Karmacoma
"You're crazy but you're lazy
I need to live and I need to
Your troubles must be seen to see through
Money like it's paper with faces I remember
I drink on a daily basis
Though it never cools my temper
It never cools my temper"
- Massive Attack, Karmacoma
"I drink an awful lot," Spike said plainly, smashing a beer can in his hand, and setting it on the table-thing in the middle of the Bebop's living room-thing. Jet looked up from a newspaper that may have been, in fact, from the week before. Jet and Spike debated about it for a while, but neither of them knew the date, so they let it drop.
"Mhh-hmm," Jet replied, looking back down to his paper. He looked austere and fatherly with his reading spectacles on. Spike opened another beer that he had wedged in the couch next to him for that very purpose.
"I mean, seriously," he went on, taking a sip of beer. "Don't you ever stop and think about the things you do and why you do them, and how they affect your life?"
Jet turned a page. "Mhh-hmm."
"It's kind of like karma; except not really. I'm only talking about things you do, here, not things you do to other people or that affect other people. I'm talking about, like, what time you brush your teeth at every day, what kind of toothpaste you use, whether or not you brush your teeth at all." Spike played with the tab on his beer. "Y'know, that sort of thing."
Jet was riveted to the newspaper. Hey, coupons. Buy one get one free two percent milk. "Mhh-hmm."
"I guess I think that drinking is better than a lot of things that I could be doing in place of drinking, though," Spike said, regarding the beer for a moment before downing some more of it. "I'm just like that. I'm an addictive personality. I'm all or nothing. I've always got to have something, you know? If it wasn't alcohol and cigarettes it'd probably be crack or cocaine or synchronized swimming or something insane like that."
"Mhh-hmm."
Spike sat forward on the couch and looked at Jet intently, holding his beer in two hands between his legs. "You know, you people used to bitch about how I never talked about myself. Now that I talk about myself, you don't even listen. I can't win. What the hell's so damned interesting in that paper, anyway?" Spike reached over and plucked the paper from Jet's hands in one fluid motion, and settled back with it as Jet made a stern face of disgruntlement.
"Hey," he growled. "What're you doing?"
"Jet," Spike growled
back. "I'm glad to know that the coupon
section of the paper is more interesting than hearing about me and my
thoughts."
Jet nabbed his paper back, though with considerably less grace and fluidness
than Spike had nabbed it. "I got news
for you, Spike," he said, settling back into the chair and adjusting his
reading glasses, "the world doesn't revolve around your drunken blather and
I've got to buy food to eat. Two for
one milk gallons is more interesting to me than your philosophical babble about
karma. I already went through my I'm
Relatively Young And Confused years. I
already went through the Coming To Grips With Not Having The Woman Around
Anymore phase."
"You're getting tired of me, aren't you?" Spike asked, sounding mildly defeated.
Jet looked at him over the edge of the paper. "I'm getting tired of seeing you drunk on my couch every day, eating my food, going on endlessly about things that don't make any sense and bothering the hell out of me while I'm just trying to be old and harmless. I'm getting tired of seeing you not do anything. Hell, even Faye was never this bad."
Spike grumbled discontentedly, took a sip of his fifth beer, and let the information sink in a little. Jet was kind of right; he hadn't been doing much of anything for about a week and a half save getting drunk and lazing about. Hell, he hadn't even been practicing his forms or anything. He justified it to himself by saying that he couldn't do anything until Ed decided to make herself present and apparent, but then again, he could be looking for her a little on his own instead of just waiting for her to appear.
"I'm going to Earth, later on," Spike informed Jet. "Maybe tomorrow. I'd like to be sober when I go."
Jet eyed Spike again. "Why are you going to Earth?"
"Find Ed," he replied, shaking his beer can.
Jet hmmed, and marveled at the fabulous deals on canned carrots. "If you go, you should tell Faye. She's been wanting to go back to Earth for a while."
"It's not a fucking pleasure cruise," Spike said, kind of wanting to avoid any excuse for himself to be drunk around just Faye for a while. He was beginning to think that he might, just might have a mild drinking problem. "It's a business trip."
"Faye's got business there," Jet said, and closed his paper. "I'm off to the store."
Spike got that old motherly instinct while Jet was gone and ended up drinking a bit more and doing some dishes, some laundry, and cleaning his guns. He accidentally broke a plate, but figured that Jet wouldn't notice and cleaned it all up fairly well and placed the broken pieces in the proper garbage receptacle.
He tried to picture himself married (to Julia of course, he never could picture himself marrying anyone else out of the sheer nature of lack of long-term relationships), doing these sorts of things all the time because naturally, any wife with half a brain would insist that her husband do some of the work. He pictured a wife bitching at him about his drinking, forbidding him to go through with his plan, pestering him about going to Earth to find Ed. And screaming at him to mow the lawn or fix the car or kill the spider in the bathroom or what have you.
He was suddenly glad he'd never gotten married.
But then he reminded himself that he was looking at all the negative aspects of marriage; not that he would fully understand the dynamic of marriage anyway, since he'd never been married. There were lots of nice things about marriage, too. If you were truly tired and worn out, your wife would take pity on you and do the chores. Your wife would know how you liked your mashed potatoes (chicken broth in the mix, lots of butter and salt and pepper, no chunks of potato), and your wife would be that nice warmness on the other side of the bed. Your wife would be an ego boost because she was yours, and you were hers, and that was the way it was supposed to be so help you God and the power of the state of wherever.
Spike did not believe in divorce, unless a guy was fucked up and hitting his wife or something, or there was infidelity. Infidelity in relationships was okay (Spike figured he'd be a hypocrite if he were against that), but infidelity in marriage was wrong, wrong, wrong. A person promised. A person promised, legally and emotionally promised to have no other and then goes and does it? Screwed up.
Spike munched quietly on a ham sandwich and drank a beer at the Bebop's table. The ham sandwich had lots and lots of mustard on it because Spike really, really liked mustard. He really, really liked ketchup too, which confused the hell out of him. People were either classified as those who preferred ketchup, or those who preferred mustard. He was both. What the hell did that mean? It couldn't possibly bode well.
And why was ketchup spelled catsup sometimes? Hmmmm.
Apparently the ham sandwich was doing little to soak up the alcohol that was in his system.
A ship was entering the hangar. Jet was back. Spike resumed eating his sandwich, savouring the mustardy goodness, when he suddenly paused again. No. That wasn't the Hammerhead. That was—
--that was the Redtail. Good Lord, Faye, here; and there he was without another ham and mustard sandwich to offer as greeting. He was running pretty low on beer, too, he thought.
The sound of the hatch grinding open, shut, footsteps, Faye poking her head into the kitchen and looking around before finally settling her eyes on Spike. "Where's Jet?" she inquired as a way of greeting.
"Out shopping," Spike mumbled around sandwich. "He was practically getting off on the milk specials."
"Ah." Faye stepped in, blue t-shirt and well-worn hip huggers and faded old sneakers. She looked like college punk-rock show fare. "I decided I'd drop by."
"Wanna beer?" Spike asked, finishing off his sandwich and placing the plate in the sink. Faye considered it for a moment, and then shook her head.
"Neh," she replied, shrugging. "Haven't really had an appetite for beer lately."
"I've had too much of an appetite for beer lately," Spike said. "Hmm. Never thought I'd see the day when you turned down a drink."
Faye favoured him with a surly look, leaning against the fridge, squaring her shoulders and trying to make the most of her diminutive height when confronted with Spike (the fact that he was sitting down was to her definite advantage). "What's that supposed to mean, you bum?"
Spike made the most of his height, stood up, and looked down at Faye. "Exactly what it sounds like, you gypsy—I didn't think I'd see the day."
Faye waved her hand in front of her face and rolled her eyes back, theatrically exaggerating her movements. "Whoa. Good Christ. Today was obviously not that day for you." She eyeballed the beer on the table and shrugged with her eyebrows. "Is living with Jet so bad that it's driven you to the drink?"
Spike snorted, and headed towards the living room, beer in hand. "It's people like you that drive people like me to the drink." He flopped down on the couch, careful not to spill his beverage, and looked at the ceiling. Blurry. "How do you eat your mashed potatoes, heathen?"
Faye looked at him oddly
from the kitchen hatch, hands stuck in the pockets of her delightfully snug
jeans. "Without lumps. I like the homogenous mixture of potato, not
potato chunks and potato puree.
Butter." She huffed. "And what the hell does that have to do with
anything?"
Spike bit his lip and shuddered at the implications of Faye liking her potatoes
just as he liked them. Well, not
exactly like he did, but close enough.
His brain hurt. "A lot."
"Whatever." Faye came down into the living room and sat in the chair by the couch, folding her arms over her chest and grousing, in general.
There was silence. Faye was too irritated to talk to Spike and Spike was too tied up in thought to even give two shits about Faye's presence at the moment. Both silently wished for Jet's return, as some sort of mediator to the conflict that they'd stumbled headlong into.
"I haven't eaten decent mashed potatoes in a long time," Spike observed, finally, and Faye didn't reply. Then: "Do you believe in karma, Faye?"
Faye was still silent, but it was a heavy sort of silent, the silence of a person who's deciding whether or not they want to stay silent or if they want to talk. Eventually her inability to not humour Spike kicked in. "Yes. If karma's real, I'm going to be in a karma coma one of these days."
Spike frowned. The term was new to him. "Karma coma?"
"Yeah," Faye said. "You know, like all the bad things I've done to people are going to catch up to me all at once and just bury me. Immobilize me. Something like that."
"Wow. That's a crappy way of looking at it."
"It's a realistic way of looking at it." She fiddled with her nails. "Do you believe in karma?"
"Yep," Spike said, and didn't explain why. Faye didn't ask why.
She knew it was probably because Spike knew that he was in for an even worse karma coma than her.
"So, what's the occasion for the visit?" he asked her.
Faye paused. Why was she there? "I don't know, really," she murmured, looking around her at the Bebop. "Boredom, I guess."
"Yeah, I guess," Spike replied, with a tone that sounded too knowing for Faye's liking.
So Spike's going to Earth, whoop-dee-freak, Faye thought to herself. I don't even know why he told me. I mean, I guess I do, but it's not like I'd want to go there with him, anyway. All it would do was make things awkward. Yeah, that'd be rad. Me, sobbing incoherently over the tombstones of parents I barely even remember, and Spike standing there smoking a cigarette, trying his damndest to pretend that nothing's happening.
Faye tried to keep herself perfectly still, getting some sort of small pleasure out of how still the water in the bathtub became when she concentrated really hard and didn't move at all. She'd spend hours on the Bebop that day, and had finally returned home about an hour ago. She'd then proceeded directly into the bath, to do some serious thinking.
I don't know if I like Spike when he drinks, anymore, she mused, eyeing her pack of cigarettes on the lip of the bathtub, but too engrossed in being perfectly still to reach for them and light one up. It used to be, like, amusing. Kind of like, ha ha, funny, look, Spike's drunk and it's funny, because he's goofy and weird and more inclined to be friendly to everyone—even inanimate objects! Now it's like, Spike is drunk and thinking too much. Overthinking some things, and thinking about things that he shouldn't be thinking about.
Faye had often had ugly feelings in her gut about what Spike might have known about her feelings for him. The last time she had seen him before he went off to die, she might as well have just told him she loved him, because it was all laid out right there. There had to have been no mistaking it; Spike wasn't an idiot. However, it seemed that he was fairly unconcerned with the whole affair. If she loved him, whatever. If she hated him, whatever. If she turned out to actually be an alien from the planet Mlerp, whatever. That seemed to be Spike's opinion on the whole thing.
But not as of late, seemingly. Something in the way Spike was acting and talking and being made Faye think that he was spending some time analyzing the situation and, in a way, deciding whether or not he was going to tolerate it anymore. There was no doubt in her mind that he knew exactly what was going on, now. Before, she thought that maybe he thought her feelings would just go away, or something. Now—she knew what he was thinking.
He thinks they won't go away unless he does something about it. Which he probably will. Faye had been waiting for the proverbial Damocles' sword to drop on her at any moment that day, while on the Bebop. Spike could only walk around the same tree so many times before he chopped it down.
Shit. Shit shit shit. Faye sunk down further into her bathwater, forgetting about her quest for stillness of liquid, and lit up a cigarette. For a while she didn't move, just sitting and smoking, and the bathroom fogged up and was vaguely reminiscent of a very humid, smoky swamp.
The situation was bad. Faye had no idea what to do, how to prepare, how she would react—the whole fact of the matter was that Spike was about as predictable as a volcano eruption. One could kind of gauge how long he had to go until he was about to burst, but not really. And then there was the annoyance and terror present in Faye because she knew that no matter what she did, even if she did have some way of knowing exactly when Spike was going to confront her about her feelings, she wasn't going to be able to handle it…well.
Oh, yeah, THAT, Faye thought. I was going to tell you about that, Spike. Someday. Really, I was. No kidding.
But that day was not today, nor was it tomorrow, nor was it any time soon, if Faye had her way. She sunk down into the bathwater until only her head was not submerged, and put out her cigarette in the water and laid it on the bathtub's lip.
It's so much easier to keep dancing around it in misery than it is to be spurned and have it over with, isn't it, Faye? She watched the ash flecks float around on the surface of the water, and it reminded her of how Spike used to somehow magically smoke cigarettes while showering.
She submerged herself completely.
