Spike wakes up at last and meets Gwen, but he's not happy about his situation.

This chapter is by me (Kat).

Again, we don't own the Bebop characters. All other characters are my own invention. This chapter is PG13 for a little bad language.

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The Dragon Wakes

Well, whaddya know? I think I'm still alive. Not only alive, but with the mother of all hangovers.

Spike didn't open his eyes, partly because he could see light through his lids, and light was definitely not something he was interested in at the moment. Not with this headache. Partly, however, he kept them shut because he wasn't sure where he was. Not on the Bebop, that was certain. The Bebop had never smelled so clean. Sanitized.

You're in a hospital, you idiot. That's the only place you could be if you're still alive. But whoever heard of a hospital where there was singing?

A woman was singing, and definitely not Faye. This woman was on key. The voice wasn't great, but it was pretty. Like waking up to bird song in the morning, something he hadn't done for a long time. Then he heard the lyrics, and the comparison to bird song fled. She was singing a bawdy little bar ditty called Why Did You Do That? He almost smiled. He would have, except he would rather know a little more about where he was and how he'd gotten there before he admitted to being awake.

He wasn't sure why he was alive in the first place. He wasn't supposed to be. Vicious had always said that only he could kill him, and Spike had believed he'd done it. Apparently not. For a bad moment, he wondered if Vicious were alive, too, somewhere in this hospital or whatever it was, but he dismissed the thought. He'd shot enough people to know death when he saw it. Vicious was dead, but, somehow, he himself had survived.

He slitted his eyes. Perhaps because he was expecting it, he noticed the difference right away. If nothing else, Vicious' death had brought him out of the dream. Both his eyes were seeing the same thing. Having a woman nearby, singing, did remind him of Julia, but it was a memory, not a vision.

However, it was a memory far too raw and painful to linger over. Instead, he looked around as best he could through his lashes. The room was too big for a hospital room, and except for what was immediately around him, it was equipped more like a lab. That's not good.

After a moment he found the singing woman. She was sitting at a long table, filling out paperwork with temperamental little slashes of her stylus, emphasizing her irritation by growling the lyrics of the song. She was really more a girl than a woman, small and compact, with a mass of unruly blonde curls, badly cut and inefficiently pulled back with two clips. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, sitting on a stool with her feet swinging inches from the floor, back and forth like some little kid. He thought she was cute.

No one else was in the room with them. He supposed it was time to wake up officially. He said the first thing that came into his mind. "Hey. You have a cigarette?"

His voice was weak, barely more than a whisper, but he got her attention. She shrieked and jumped. Then she bounced up and trotted over to peer at him. He winked at her.

She grinned. "I'll skip the obvious exclamations, like, oh-you're-awake," she said, reaching down to lay fingers on his wrist.

Following her movement with his eyes, he realized that he was strapped down to the bed. "What's this for?" he demanded. He was going to tug at the restraints, but his arms wouldn't respond. That worried him.

"You were thrashing around in your sleep. Not a good thing to do for a man in your condition."

Thrashing around. Then he wasn't paralyzed. "And just what is my condition?"

"Lets say you couldn't arm wrestle a two-year-old," she said, bending to loosen the straps on his arms.

He tried to move one arm. She was right. A two-year-old could have creamed him. "Think you could be a bit more specific?"

"Later, maybe. How do you feel?"

"Like shit."

"Think you could be a bit more specific?"

"I will if you will."

She laughed. "You first."

"My head feels like it's imploded, and I can't move. Much. Other than that, I'm just fine. Nothing hurts except my head, but that hurts like a son-of-a-bitch. Where am I, anyway? This isn't a hospital."

"It is right now. It's a private facility set up by the ISSP."

"Yeah? The ISSP? Why would they do that for me?"

She gave him an odd look, then said, "Disorientation is a common symptom."

"Symptom of what? And I'm not disoriented."

"Symptom of short-term cryosleep. What's your last memory?"

"Falling down on the stairs."

She sighed. "Oh, dear. I'm too ignorant to help here. Do you remember your name?"

"Yes."

She waited. So did he. At last they both grinned and she said, "OK, you win. I'll ask it. What is your name?"

"Spike Spiegel. What's yours?"

She gaped at him. "Spike Spiegel?"

What had he done to get that reaction?

Then she did something even more strange. She scowled at him and said, "Quit joking."

"I'm not. That's my name. You don't like it?"

"You can't be Spike Spiegel."

"Somebody took over my identity while I was out?"

"No. Spike Spiegel's dead."

He blinked. "I don't feel that bad."

"Are you really Spiegel? You're not just pulling my leg?"

He smiled. "How can I pull your leg when I can't even move? If you don't believe me, you don't. But that's who I am."

She jumped up and started pacing around the room, muttering about him falling on the stairs. "What the heck is going on?" she suddenly said aloud.

"I was going to ask you the same question."

"Oh man oh man. I've got to think. I've got this all wrong."

She wasn't talking to him, but to herself. Before she wandered further off, either mentally or physically, he reminded her, "Hey, you owe me an explanation, remember?"

"I do? Of what?"

"Of why I can't move, for one thing."

"Oh, that."

"Yeah. That."

She paused to collect her thoughts. He could almost see her shifting into "medical" mode. When she was composed, she said, "You've been unconscious for four days. You spent two days in cryosleep, which was not well handled. At least now I know why it was so screwed up," she said, talking to herself again. "Then you've had three operations in the past two days. And all this time you've been getting your nutrition through a vein. You're just weak."

"Now I'm hungry, too."

"You can't have any solid food yet."

"Oh, great! Can I at least get the rest of me unstrapped?"

"Sure. But don't try to sit up. You're not ready for it yet."

"What are you, a nurse?"

"No, I'm a doctor." Seeing his expression, she said, "Don't say it."

"You don't look old enough to be a doctor."

"You had to say it, didn't you?" She sighed. "Take my word for it, I'm a doctor. Dr. Gwenyth Hammond. But call me Gwen." She held out a hand.

He actually got his own hand high enough to shake. "Now can I have a cigarette? I know I had some in my jacket."

"You can't smoke in here."

"Why not?"

"There's stuff in here that might blow up if you do."

He pondered whether that was a good enough reason, then decided it wasn't. But before he could explain this to her, he abruptly went back to sleep.

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Gwen was informing him that the cigarettes in his jacket had probably been disposed of along with his clothes, when he'd first been put into the cryoshell, but midway through the first sentence, she realized she'd lost her audience. He'd gone to sleep. She shut up and stood staring down at him silently.

He had beautiful mahogany-brown eyes, even if the left one, as she knew from the records, was a functioning bio-prosthetic. When he smiled, his eyes smiled before his mouth did. And he had a kind of bravado, a gallant courage, that she liked. She'd had patients wake up and give her a hard time before, but never one that made her laugh or challenged her wit.

She felt shaky at the knees, but that, she was sure, was from finding out who he really was. Even without his name, she would have known she was mistaken in her guess about his identity. The ISSP would never hire a man like this one, even for undercover work. She could see already that he was a maverick type, nothing like the usual ISSP man, just by the way he teased her and treated his situation so lightly. But not in a million years would she have ever guessed he was Spike Spiegel. Like everyone else in ISSP, she'd believed Spiegel was dead.

Dr. Chan had assumed she had probably never heard of Spiegel, and under ordinary circumstances he would have been right. She hated and feared the syndicates and adopted an ostrichlike view of them — have nothing they wanted, pay them no attention, and maybe they'd leave you alone. But thanks to Bertie Mkambo, she knew more about Spiegel than she'd ever wanted to know. She clasped her hands together. Wouldn't Bertie love to be here now, taking care of this patient! According to Bertie, officers of the ISSP were split almost evenly about whether they believed Spiegel was a hero, a lunatic, or a man willing to do anything to take over the Dragons, but naturally Bertie had no doubts. Spiegel was a warrior, and therefore a hero to him.

She wondered if she would ever get to tell Bertie that she'd met Spike Spiegel. She doubted it, however, given the oaths she'd sworn when she'd come here. That was too bad. She was tempted, but when she gave her word, she didn't break it, and Hitchcock had made her swear just about every way except on her parents' grave, not to mention sign in six or eight different places on two different security documents.

That train of thought led her to wonder just why Spiegel was here, and under such secrecy, and why his death had been faked. Who, exactly, was Chan working for? What department? And what were they up to? How could Spike Spiegel possibly benefit the ISSP? She sat down at her desk, hooked her toes behind the stool rail, put her head in her hands, and tried to think.

Much later, she gave it up as futile. She had a lot of theories, some of them truly bizarre, but she simply didn't have enough facts. Whatever it was that Chan and his bosses wanted with Spiegel, though, she was sure it wasn't good, and for some reason she'd become protective of this patient with whom she'd spent so much silent time. She hoped he would wake up again before Chan returned, so she could talk to him. He might have an idea why the ISSP would help him like this. It might even be something harmless, and she was making menacing mountains out of molehills.

But she didn't think so.

He woke up again less than an hour later. She was reading, trying to find a way to ignore the time trickling away before Chan showed up, and once more his voice startled her. "Hey. Gwen. I'm hungry."

She jumped yet again, dropping the book on the floor.

"A little old-fashioned, isn't it?"

Huh? "What is?"

He looked pointedly down at the book.

She bent to scoop it up. "I like real books. They're, um, they're not cold. That doesn't make any sense, does it?"

"Sure it does. You have anything around here to eat?"

"I told you, it's too soon for you to have solid food."

"How about a drink?"

"Water, yes."

"You know, you don't look like a sadist."

She giggled, then stopped herself. What was it about this guy that made her act closer to 16 than 26? "Would you like some water?"

"Yeah, if that's all you've got. Do I get to sit up?"

"I'll crank up the bed." She absently told the computer how many degrees, her eyes and attention on her patient. "You know, you're looking a lot better already."

"Better than what?" he asked drily.

"Better than a corpse," she smiled. "You can get water at any time from this tube, at least as long as you're sitting. Do you feel up to talking?"

He was drinking, and she tried to hide her impatience until he was satisfied. She wasn't too successful at it; when he gave her his attention, it was with a satirically cocked eyebrow. "We don't have much time," she explained.

"Before what?"

"Before Dr. Chan comes by to check on you. Do you really have no idea why the ISSP might want to help you?"

"None at all." His voice was stronger now, with more expression. She could tell that he not only didn't know, he didn't really care much, either. "Nobody owes me any favors, and I don't owe any. I don't even know anybody in the ISSP. The closest I come is a friend of mine, and he's not ISSP any more."

"Mr. Black," she assumed aloud.

"You know Jet?"

She smiled. "No, but I've heard of him, very recently. My old boss is a big fan of yours."

"A what?"

"It's a long story. We'll save it for later. Let me tell you what's going on here, quickly, before Chan gets back."

"Go ahead."

Even knowing she couldn't be overheard, she unconsciously leaned forward and spoke in a low voice. "Understand, I'm on the proverbial need-to-know basis, and they don't think I need to know anything, so this won't take long. First, you were brought here in complete secrecy. As far as anybody in the outside world knows, you are dead and buried. For several reasons, I believe that only a handful of people in the ISSP know that you're here. We're not even being monitored, which is why I can talk to you like this. I'm the only other medical person of any description on your case. Dr. Chan and his two bosses are the only people involved that I've been allowed to meet, and I'm not allowed to discuss any detail of the case with anyone or even leave this compound until the assignment is over."

He smiled crookedly. "That must put a real crimp in your social life."

"Are you taking this seriously?"

"Sure. What else do you know?"

"Nothing. Except, of course, the obvious. The ISSP is investing a lot of money into getting you back on your feet. They're going to want something in return, and if you don't give it to them, you might end up really dead. They've already got a grave to put you in, after all."

"You sure are a cheerful little thing, aren't you?"

"I'm scared." That was the first time she'd admitted it, even to herself. But she was scared, and not just for him. She hopped from one foot to the other. "I hope this is all something silly and I'm just imagining too much."

"It doesn't sound like it to me."

"You believe me."

He smiled. "You have an honest face."

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They've already got a grave to put you in, after all. Not at all a cheering thought. Now that he was sure he was alive, Spike didn't think he was quite ready to be dead again. It was one thing to go out and face death when both the past and the future were blocked by painful memories and unpaid blood-debts, and to face it at the hands of the man he'd sworn to kill. There was a kind of excitement in that, and justice as well. It was another thing altogether to sit helpless – and he was helpless right now, he could still barely move, dammit, he needed a meal – and let the ISSP obliterate his very existence. He flexed his wrist, which had a mark from the leather straps. Bad move, boys. You should have just left me there to finish dying. Whatever the ISSP wanted him for, it was bound to be no good. He was going to discover their game, and then he would find a way out of here without obliging them.

And then what? Go where? The only place he could think of was the Bebop. If he had a home at all, anywhere... well, the Bebop was it.

Wouldn't Jet be surprised if he turned up again? He smiled at the thought, and wondered if Faye were still on the ship. He doubted it. He didn't think Jet and Faye could stand each other for 48 hours, never mind a week or so. Not without him to pick on, and only each other. Of course, knowing Faye, they probably made a bet as to whether he came back or not. He wondered who had bet against him, as if he couldn't guess. She was going to have to give the money back. That's a laugh. Ol' Jet'll just be another of the people she owes money to.

He glanced at Gwen, who was busily doing something with the machine feeding him antibiotics, dictating quietly into a suspended microphone as she worked. She didn't look like a doctor, but she acted reassuringly like one. She said she was scared, but he wondered if she really understood that, if they had a grave ready for him, they surely had one for her, too. And while they had a use for him, when he was healthy they would no longer have a use for Gwen, and she'd end up there. She had "expendable" written all over her.

That's not your responsibility. She's smart, she can get herself out of this. You're going to have a hard enough time just saving your own butt. Yet he recognized, with a wry self-knowledge, that he couldn't just leave her here to her fate without making some effort to help her. At least for the moment, her destiny was tied with his, whether either of them liked it or not.

Of course, the whole situation could be academic. The ISSP might want something he'd be glad to give them. They'd all be friends and all be happy.

They've already got a grave to put you in, after all. No, he didn't think it would be that easy.

But it was going to be interesting.