What's this? I have to write a disclaimer? Bah, fine. But I'll tell you all something, I own Cowboy Bebop. That's right, I own it! I also own the Wonka chocolate factory and the free world. Know what else? I own YOU! That's right! I own you all—BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *diabolical laughter*
*ahem* ok so that wasn't true (yes it was)
I don't own so don't sue, mkay?
Chapter 4
~~*flashback*~~
The moon—the wrong moon for this red planet—finally faded away and left the sky looking as it should. The man trudged out of the abandoned apartment building, dragging his feet and trying not to stare at the little white flakes of light that fell from where the image had been. It looked so much like snow—beautiful shimmering snow—and he remembered home.
It didn't snow where he lived. It rained. It rained horrible little spores and seeds and pollen that glinted in the orange light of Venus and came down to kill the planet's people.
Come to think of it, it was the rain's fault for this whole mess. If it hadn't rained and hurt that girl the operation would never had happened.
But then again…
If she hadn't found him lying on the road that night he wouldn't have been there to pay for the operation in the first place and she'd be all right. Deformed, but all right.
But then again…
She'd been scared of him. It was her brother who'd seen he was alive and decided to take him in. If her brother hadn't saved him this whole thing wouldn't have happened.
But then again…
If he hadn't taken those drugs he'd never have needed saving. Which meant it was his fault. All his fault. The moon was gone now, that was a sign—another person was dead. That made the tenth.
And it was all his fault. Even if he hadn't been the one to pull the trigger, those ten were dead because of what he'd done. If that damn girl's damn brother hadn't been so damn good a person he would have been left to die like he should have, and none of this would have happened. It was all his fault.
The man clenched his fists and struck the side of the building with it. He was going to hell. He hadn't been able to save his savior. He hadn't been able to save one person—instead he'd killed ten and there were more just a phone call away. .
And then, inevitably at the worst of times, his communicator buzzed. He brought a limp hand to his inside pocket and drew out the mobile, not wanting to answer but knowing the consequences for his stupid stupid wants.
"Flowers dead?" asked the person on the other line. The devil, or his advocate, had stolen his soul and now he had to work off the debt.
"Of course they are," he answered. "They always die when you finish."
The advocate, a man by the name of Dismer, made a disgruntled noise. "Fine then, fine. You'll be heading off to earth then for the next target."
He winced. "Another? How many more?"
"What—exactly?" Dismer laughed a little for no real reason. He was a very cheerful man for someone so disgusting. "Two, if you must know." The tone of the advocate's voice changed, and he sounded like one of those imps from the clinics who spoke to him as if he needed to be calmed down. "Don't worry—I checked on your kid and she's fine. Two more and you'll both be free, I'll even help you out, if you help me like a good man."
"Where on earth to you want the poppies?"
"Singapore. There's this old wreck of a mansion, I'll email the address when I get it confirmed, but I expect my target to show up there within the month."
The man could only stare at the tiny comm. screen with a morbid look. "How do you figure?"
Dismer rolled his eyes. "You should know by now that I'm excellent at reading people. The target is a woman, and they're a sentimental species. She'll fly back home sooner or later."
"What if she's already there?"
The advocate chuckled, finding the man too humorous for words—although he had a dark sense of comedy to be sure. "Fine, have it your way," a picture of a woman with short dark hair and shifty eyes appeared on the little screen. "If you see her, hold her—you know the drill."
Nodding mutely, the man stared at the eyes of the next one to die, but she hadn't faced the camera and she didn't stare back. The picture was really a mug shot, and thus labeled with a name: Faye Valentine.
The man shuddered. This wasn't the first time he'd seen the face of the now-deceased, but this was the first time he'd known a name along with the picture. He hated to know. When he hadn't known the name it was just another person, another shadowed figure, just anyone he could pass or who could have passed him on the street. But having a name--that made you a person. That made a human exist, or so some part of him believed.
This Miss Valentine… he wished she was still a stranger to him.
"I'll be checking up on you," Dismer reminded him. "Don't have too much fun now," the voice mocked him a little, but it wasn't really hate filled. The advocate didn't care enough to really hate him or anyone really, but killing was Dismer's business and his dark sense of humor made it interesting.
Putting the comm. back in his pocket, the man continued to trudge down the Martian street, light from the shadow of a moon now completely gone. Dawn was coming, and it looked so disgustingly hopeful that he felt sure the sun was mocking him. He turned away from the brightness peeking through the buildings and heaved towards the port where he'd parked his little shuttle.
On his way, about half way up a hill, he passed the old chapel. The building was falling apart at the beams but nobody had ever bothered to do anything about it. The man knew there were rumors about that place, that bad people liked to come there, but even if the church was now a dark homestead he still felt the steeple's cross staring at him disapprovingly for all his sins.
But he wasn't alone this time. A small crowd of people stood around the courtyard in front of the chapel, all looking too nervous to more forward. All of them were watching the open doors leading to a shadowed interior that nobody could see through.
All of them watching, all of them quiet, all of them holding their breath as if waiting for something….
This was certainly a site for curious eyes. This crowd appeared to be Syndicate men. The man stopped a respectable distance behind all those men in their formidable black suits and trench coats and looked at the entryway to the chapel. He couldn't see what the others were staring at, or perhaps it hadn't shown up yet.
The silence felt eerie on the skin, and he found himself holding his breath like all the others. And then something happened. Some shadowed figure came walking slowly out into the light, and all the spectators had their eyes on this new person. They leaned forward, wondering, waiting, wanting an explanation….
This new person was a man covered in blood. His hair was tousled and cuts and bullet holes crossed his body in what appeared to be every place. Nobody rushed forward to help him. Everyone seemed to be waiting still, waiting for something.
The bloody man was smiling a mean, depressing grin and he raised a shaky arm. One eye closed, the other one staring into the faces of the crowd, his fingers formed a makeshift gun and he pretended to fire.
"Bang," said the new one, but our man standing at the back was the only one to jump at the penetrated silence.
The blood-coated visitor fell in a dead heap on the steps.
It seemed like time stood still for a moment. Someone from the crowd walked slowly forward, each step echoing off of walls that didn't exist, and he stopped in front of the bleeding body on the cement. Taking off his black jacket, the Syndicate man dropped it across the cadaver, then turning back to the others he nodded in the direction of the chapel doors. One by one, step by echoing step, the Syndicate men walked into the church leaving our man still standing in the street to stare in awe at whatever had just occurred.
He looked over to the black jacket, with trickles of blood flowing under the hem and down the stairs, and he felt a horrible sense of familiarity.
The steeple's cross watched him again, and he shuddered under the wait of a God he'd failed. Cautiously, he moved closer to the bloodied heap and lifted the jacket up a little. Automatically, he reached a hand down to check for a pulse. It took him a minute to realize that he'd found one: a slow, failing beat from a heart that wasn't even trying to live.
And the cross stared at him, and the scent of the poppies filled his nose, and the ghosts of those ten people whispered and he remembered he would go to hell because he hadn't saved them…
He stared at the man who was so close to becoming a corpse and remembered his own experiences. If he'd been left to die in the street, there were so many bad things that would never have happened. This man here on the steps… if he were to live would the consequences be bad as well?
But then again…
If he didn't save someone, he'd surely go to hell. So with that thought on his pitiful sliver of a mind, Yolan Davis took out his communicator and called for an ambulance.
~~*end flashback*~~
"So what happened to my ship?" Faye asked after she'd sufficiently calmed down.
"Impound lot." Spike replied, and it didn't look like he'd say anything else. He was reclining against a rough red Martian rock where they sat outside the tepee by the campfire, waiting for Ed to return from wherever she'd gone.
Faye wished he'd either say something else or just go to sleep. She'd had a good rest, although she still felt slightly ill, and didn't think she could sleep right away. There was so much on her mind right then, she couldn't settle back into the silence she'd enjoyed before their conversation had gotten too serious.
Spike hadn't returned because he thought there was nothing to return to… Faye began to muse on that thought. He said he told his rescuer—or rather her bounty, Mr. Davis--to find the Bebop, which meant that he'd intended to come back after all. But then again, there wasn't really another place Spike could go. Once he'd recovered, would he have left again?
The fact that he might have was so possible it made her feel rather afraid deep down to know that things might have ended up the same, Vicious or no. He'd done what he wanted, he got rid of his past once and for all, and he really didn't need her and Jet. He may have had nowhere else to go but the Bebop before, but now that he was free, Spike Spiegel could go out and find a place—anywhere he wanted! He didn't have to worry about the Syndicate dropping in after all…
But there he was, just sitting next to her. She certainly didn't need help any more, he could have left but he hadn't so maybe he would have stayed…yet…
Perhaps he knew, she realized. Perhaps he knew that it was her who had nowhere to go, and no will to find a place. Perhaps Spike was only sitting there with her, waiting for Radical Edward and her dog, because he felt a Jet-like urge to take in strays.
Or perhaps he wanted to return to the Bebop with her.
The different possibilities spun in Faye's mind until she couldn't even decide which was the more probable. "Spike?" it was her curiosity taking voice that made her address him, although the rest of her just preferred to sit and wonder.
"Hn?" he grunted, eyes still closed and cigarette between the lips.
She opened her mouth, intending to ask him what his plans were, but lost her nerve and closed it again. Eyes searching for an alternate topic of conversation, they landed on the tepee, and before she knew it she was asking him, "What do you think about wolves?"
Spike, caught off guard by the apparently random question, arched an eyebrow in slight confusion and opened his eyes. "What are you talking about?"
"Wolves," she replied curtly. "What's your opinion?"
He narrowed his eyes, now figuring she was up to something. "They're extinct now, right?" he asked carefully.
"Are they?" her voice sounded distracted.
"What brought this on?" Spike followed her gaze and his eyes landed on the tepee. He suddenly grinned slyly at her. "I get it, he gave you a nickname, didn't he? that old man…" he jerked his head towards Laughing Bull's tent.
Faye cracked a smile. "As a matter of fact he did."
"So what is it?"
" 'Sleeping Wolf', if you must know." The corners of her mouth turned up as the small smile turned to a smirk and she looked back at him. "Do ~you~ have a nickname?"
Spike, still looking amused, closed his eyes again and settled back into his previous position. " 'Swimming Bird'."
Faye blinked once, registering that, then gave a little laugh.
"What?"
"My animal can eat yours."
~~*Flashback*~~
Yolan tapped the keyboard, same key with the same finger, over and over again. He didn't know what he was doing, let alone where to start. Computers weren't his thing, nothing was actually, but now that he knew the name of the target he just had to know who she was.
A woman at the cyber café helped him log onto the YMCA website to look up old bounties. He told her he was a bounty hunter but she'd merely given him the smile-and-nod, obviously thinking he was some sort of ridiculous Cowboy aficionado. He had to admit he wasn't surprised, it wasn't as if he had the confidence or the build or even the air about him to get involved with the Y—so he just tapped the keys one at a time in an amateur fashion and browsed the website.
He was searching, desperately so, for something to ease his conscious. That picture of her was a mugshot, right? So she was a criminal. Perhaps she was a murderer—maybe she'd massacred someone and would have gotten the death penalty anyway so it would be no big deal if Dismer killed her. Maybe she deserved it!
But two hours of searching later, Davis lost hope. Faye Valentine was not a murderer. She was not on death row. In fact, the bounty on her head wasn't even active anymore—she was a bounty hunter herself! She was just a gambler and a cheater—a woman with human flaws not even bordering on his own. She was probably just minding her own business on that Bebop ship she was last registered at, or bringing a criminal to justice or something not worth being killed for.
So he was a criminal. An accessory to murder and a drug dealer and the two things he could say he'd done right with almost certainty was escaping weed and pulling some guy off the chapel steps—a man who was still unconscious back at the hotel and probably wouldn't even make it.
If he found this Faye, she'd probably turn him in for some woolongs before he could even warn her what was coming. But he couldn't warn her anyway. If he did, and if Dismer couldn't kill her, Margaret would never get that horrible collar off and things would get worse and worse.
She'd been growing more and more unstable, and the damage would be irreversible if that monitor wasn't removed soon not to mention the damage she could inflict on others with that disgusting gift of hers…
This had to stop, Yolan decided. It really did. Had it taken ten murders for him to finally crack under the pressure? No… he could keep going…just two more and it would be done with and when Margaret was free and able to take care of herself he could make up for everything by throwing himself off a building or something… just two more…
Yolan paid for his computer time and trudged back to the hotel, dragging his feet once again. . But when he opened the door he received his second piece of news: that man he'd saved, he was awake!
Lying on the ugly and now bloodstained sheets was the skinny, bandaged person, staring up at the ceiling and looking, well, bored.
At least this was good news. The guy could tell him who to call, and Yolan could finally get off of Mars and over to Earth to set the trap.
"Good! You're awake!" he cried, rushing over. "I guess that means you'll make it—I was really amazed you'd lived with all those injuries but still I wasn't optimistic in the least bit. I'm not that lucky, you know."
The man's eyes, weird looking reddish-brown ones, flicked over to give him a kind of sarcastic look as if to say: I'm here injured and you're complaining about YOUR luck? But instead all the man said, and with a generous amount of effort, was "Where?"
"You're on Mars," Yolan told him. "Not too far from where I found you, just a few blocks, actually." He paused, then pulled up the chair from the desk and sat backwards. He was smiling, which something in the back of his mind found odd. After all, with his life, why should he smile? But something had actually gone right. He'd saved a person! Sure Faye Valentine would die because of what he was going to do, but he'd at least saved this person and maybe that was enough for redemption.
"You were so beaten up, and with all those Syndicate men around-really! I'm curious, what happened to you?"
The man's expression was a mixture of 'who the hell is this guy' and 'this is completely the wrong time'.
"Well you're probably too tired to do anything right now so I'll call room service and have them bring up something—I think you're stomach's in one piece so you should get some food—oh! Hey, what's your name anyway?"
The man closed his eyes again, looking worn out but still very bored. "Spike Spiegel" he muttered almost bitterly but with definite casualness, then more to himself, "I haven't escaped myself yet."
~~*end flashback*~~
Jet frowned at the computer, and it "frowned" back, beeping and buzzing with annoying persistence as it tried to made sense out of the flower. He'd put Margaret's little gift through the data analyzer, but the machine couldn't make heads or tails out of it. One thing was clear: it might look like a poppy, and smell like a poppy, but it certainly was NOT a poppy.
Which brought across the question: what kind of drugs would a flower like this make?
At first he hadn't thought twice about it, but then he remembered something the detective had said. Those ten bodies Yolan was a suspect for had been covered in "poppy spores". The words had bothered him, and Jet couldn't figure out why until he took a good look at the flower Margaret had given him and realized something: poppies don't have spores.
Poppies reproduce though pollination, which meant that there was something up with this whole opium business. At first he'd figured that the kid had given him a different flower, but when he researched the subject he saw no outward difference between his dried souvenir and the picture of a real poppy on his computer.
Someone had made this plant to look like its narcotic producing twin—he said made, because the genetic structure had been altered and that didn't just happen on its own. The data analyzer hadn't seen anything like it: a plant with human DNA strands combined with some kind of chemical…
…"Apparently this flower gives off a hallucinogen," Jet was explaining to the Red Tail. He hadn't been able to find Faye, and she didn't answer her communicator, so he was leaving a message on her ship. "The spores go into the atmosphere and they are set to produce some kind of image, even out into space. I tried to make the image appear but apparently it needs to react with something else to work, I don't know what, and I don't think it'll work with the poppy I've got because it's dried.
The Red Tail didn't seem to care, and Jet glared at the communicator with anger and frustration. It would be just like Faye not to check in—well actually more like Spike; Faye was the one to leave without checking in and maybe call later. If a job went too long or too slow, Faye would often get bored and call in, usually talking to Edward.
It had been almost four days now without word from her, and Jet had started to worry a little until he remembered that this was Faye here. No matter what she did or where she went, leaving for good or for a job or what not, she always drifted back one way or another.
"I'll try to find out more, meet me on Ganymede, the bounty's headed there."
~~*Flashback*~~
And Spike had thought the Bebop's ceiling was ugly; it had nothing on this hotel.
He still couldn't move, in fact, he could hardly talk—not that he really felt like talking to that weird red-haired guy who'd apparently saved him.
It was so strange. For the first time in his life, Spike couldn't quite figure out what he was thinking. His thoughts kept drifting, landing on various things of extreme or little consequence.
If I'm alive, did Vicious make it? Where's my ship, anyway? What's the date? Damn this hurts…
Pain had been the strange surprise which had roused him from sleep. It wasn't as if he hadn't been hurt before, but normally, a few bumps and bruises and lacerations and bullets through various parts didn't seem to be that big a deal—well that may be overdoing things, but really, he'd been in more discomfort than actual pain.
Nerves of steel? No, he'd just been unable to feel. He'd dulled himself against emotional pain, but somewhere along the line, physical pain had subsided too, leaving him in a grey world of only half-sensations.
It wasn't as if, right then, things had gone from grey to rainbow, but blotches of pale colors seemed to be peeking through as he tried to move and found that a bullet through the arm hurt more than he remembered.
"I'm back!" and yet, the most persistent pain came from Spike's severe annoyance with this tanned fellow who still hadn't revealed his name. "How are you feeling?"
Spike stared at the man and for the first time realized he looked not unlike like a male, older Edward on steroids. "Disturbed."
The man raised an eyebrow in slight confusion, and then seemed to shrug it off. "Well you look better than yesterday… I think it would be safe to move you now…" The man looked jerky.
From the moment Spike had woken he'd noticed something odd about him. Red-head was always trying to look very calm and pleasant, but mere millimeters under the surface was some kind of frightened, twitching, animal wearing human skin. "A-anyway, I've got a family thing—Business, I've got business off world—I don't live on Mars you see, which explains the hotel and…" Finally giving up with attempted excuses, Red-head asked, "Is there someone I can call to get you?"
Spike stared, not at anything in particular, and felt his thoughts collide once more as his mind was bombarded with flashes of memory and scenarios.
He could picture it, and it was nothing glamorous, but what he knew would happen. He'd have to lie on that gross plastic couch, with Faye's ridicule and Jet's you-did-it-to-yourself commentary. If he tried to come back with any bits of sarcasm, the shrew would punch his injuries at such an angle that even he, buried deep as he could go in memories, could feel the pain from it.
And they would yell at him, and Faye would just about blow her top and probably storm off the ship with his money, headed for a casino.
And he could just hear her. She'd give him a lecture—she'd do it as often as she could before he could walk again—and she'd tell him what an idiot he was for getting himself into such a mess and she would remind him that she warned him and she'd say "I told you so". She'd probably give him another punch for good measure, and Jet would roll his eyes, pretending he wasn't completely amused.
Somehow, for reasons Spike wasn't sure of, the thoughts of those two giving him a hard time took some weight off his mind as he rolled his eyes at the visions and imagined comebacks to their sarcasm. But the pain from his various injuries seemed to have increased a little.
"Well, I suppose you could call the ship I lived on," Spike told Redhead, breathing through the pain and craving a cigarette.
"All right then!" the man seemed incredibly relieved. "What's the name of the ship?"
"The Bebop."
There was a pause. "Bebop, you said?" Spike couldn't name the look on Redhead's face, but it was pretty close to a twitching panic and he began to mutter something about a woman before he replied, "I think that's the name of the ship that crashed into Callisto, I'm sorry."
It happened so fast it was almost unexpected, but the pain faded from his scaring skin and simmered down into a minorly distracting throb. It was as if he could already feel the broken bones speed their healing. Spike didn't even realize everything looked gray again; he merely perceived it as normal. The chaos in his mind ceased, replaced with only a few stray thoughts.
Dead, huh? Figures; something like that was bound to happen.
So what now?
Dimly he recalled the last time he'd thought that. It had been just after Julia; before he'd met Jet, and even before he'd become a cowboy. He'd been reclining on a park bench close to dawn, in this very city in fact, dead tired and just out of the hospital—or whatever you'd call that place.
His cigarette had almost burned completely, and the city looked incredibly unfocused and dismal in the pale sunbeams that peeked though before their source. But maybe it hadn't been the sky, but his brand new eye not appreciating the aesthetics of it—then again, he couldn't appreciate much at that time, and little more since.
He'd let the smoke add to the grey blur of the town, and he'd wondered: what now?
~*end flashback*~
Faye's patience had run out hours ago. The sun would rise within the hour and Ed—who according to Spike had gone off exploring when she was forbidden help with the injured Faye-Faye—was still unaccounted for, and neither was the dog.
"Why don't you call her?" asked Spike in a slightly irritated fashion. He sat on a log aside the dying fire, absently watching Faye pace.
Making some sort of noise that bordered on primal, Faye threw her communicator at him, which he caught. "It's that piece of junk," she snapped. "I don't know what happened to it but it hasn't worked for days."
Spike turned the comm. over in his hands, eyeing it with casual interest. He pressed the call button but nothing happened although the reception registered as good. "You should take better care of your things if you don't know how to repair them," he commented, and she stopped her pacing mid step to glare at him with a slightly twitching eye. He sent her the standard smile for a standard hissy-fit.
Faye strode over with stiff steps and snatched the device back and then, throwing it on the ground, she took out her gun and aimed it at the comm..
"What are you doing?" Spike asked, raising an eyebrow and looking amused.
"Fixing it," replied Faye, flashing a grin over her shoulder. "The Spike Spiegel way—or should I kick it first?"
Raising his hands in mock surrender, and with a noise something between a sigh and a laugh, Spike stood up and moved toward her. "Fine, fine, you've made your point now don't waist good machinery."
"Well," Faye resigned, hiding her weapon again and picking up the communicator, "If the kid ever shows up she can probably make it work." She shoved it in her jacket pocket next to her deck of cards. "Guess that leaves waiting."
Eyeing Faye as she sat down again, trying to make herself comfortable, Spike gave an exasperated sigh and stuffed his hands in his pockets. "Well come on," he ordered, starting to walk towards the dock entry in the direction of the main road. "We can call her from my hotel."
"Hotel?" Faye echoed loudly, jumping up. "Why didn't you say that earlier?! We wouldn't have had to sleep on the ground!" She jogged to catch up with him before matching his strides with her hands on her hips.
Spike shrugged. "I figured Ed would be back sooner," he replied, but not in a tone that was trying to defend him.
Faye made a growling noise and muttered things about stupid men and their stupid logic. "What happened to your communicator? We could've called from here if you had your heart set on sleeping on rocks."
He shrugged again. "Don't carry it with me."
She opened her mouth with every intention of telling him how stupid that was—what if there was an emergency et cetera—but caught herself just in time as she realized the reason. He'd left his comm. behind because he had nobody to call. For the past few weeks, Spike had been—or at least thought he was—completely alone.
Trotting slightly behind him now, Faye's mind began to drift back to the times before the Bebop. She'd always carried her cellular phone—it took her a long time to think of it more as a science fiction device than a phone—just in case. She'd gone through a few partners in crime, and kept a few contacts on her good side, but normally she'd worked alone. But she'd made and received plenty of calls either way, always talking to bookies and establishments wanting to hire the famous Poker Alice.
But Spike wasn't the type to get into that kind of trouble—he got into trouble of course, but not her particular kind. Spike had a manner about him that allowed him to easily slip in and out of a conversation, and Faye realized for the first time how lucky he was to have such a talent. Without that, he would have spent all his time in silence, which is cruel even for someone who prefers solitude.
Again Faye wondered what Spike was planning. After she called Ed, she planned on calling Jet and giving him the news about their not-all-that-dead comrade. She could just imagine the old man throwing a fit worse than she could ever do and going all parental on the bounty hunter's sorry butt.
'What makes you think you can just come back after that stunt you pulled?', Faye could just hear Jet say that, but of course they both wanted Spike back not to mention Ed and Ein.
But would Spike come back? Would he continue to be a cowboy, the notorious occupation for those who have nothing left? Would he even want to stay once again on a fishing boat with no meat and nothing to offer but the people who'd put his communicator to use?
Spike...
"Hey…" Faye started, catching his attention.
"Hn?" he didn't turn to look at her, but she knew that he was paying attention.
Faye opened her mouth, and shut it again, not sure of how to start. She doubted she'd ever get the hang of serious conversations with the Lunkhead, and suddenly felt grateful that he wasn't facing her, for her expression was bound to look dumb.
She opened her mouth intending to just adlib her way through as usual. "I—AGGH!"
"FAYE-FAYEEEEEE!" Ed cried. She'd jumped Faye from behind and her slinky arms were wrapped around the older woman's neck, much in the same way she'd tackled Spike the day before.
"What's the big idea?!" Faye detangled herself and forced Ed to a normal standing position. "Don't do that to people—and where have you been anyway?!"
But Edward refused to stand still. She began to jump and prance around, an aggravated looking corgi barking at her heels. "Ed has found them! Ed has found them!"
"Found what?" inquired Spike, walking over to the girls.
Faye'd finally managed to grab the child's shoulders, but Ed's head was still rolling this way and that. "Poppies, Ed found!" she announced proudly.
Spike gave Faye a questioning look, and for a moment she appeared just as confused, but then she remembered the job she'd given the kid back on Earth. "Hold it, are you serious?" she shook the girls shoulders, but it didn't seem to help her attention span. "Where are they?"
"Ed will show you!" With a military salute and a smile, Edward wriggled out of Faye's grasp and bounded down the street, Ein in hot pursuit.
"Hey! Hold on!" Faye shouted, but knowing that wouldn't help, she began to run after the pair.
She'd run at least two blocks before the thought came to her that if she lost track of him, she might not find Spike again. She still didn't know if he intended to come back to the Bebop with her or not, now that he didn't need to be patched up anymore, and he'd been sticking around with her to wait for Ed before and now Ed had arrived. So was that all? Faye wondered if he'd just shrug them off like he did everything else and head to his hotel—which she didn't know how to find either. But when she looked over her shoulder, she caught a glimpse of Spike just rounding the corner.
He was following. Not joining in the ridiculous chase, but trailing them. He'd walk quickly when they were in a straight line and within his vision, and when Faye followed Ed around a corner he'd pick up the pace just enough to turn along with them and watch them down the next straight road.
Faye smiled, but her relief melted into nervousness as the path Ed led her on began to look familiar. She'd taken this road before, in a car however, and not because she'd wanted to come.
This couldn't possibly be…
Almost at once, as the knot in her stomach tightened, she found she'd lost track of Edward. Ein's frantic barking however, was enough to lead her to the place some part of her mind knew she'd end up again.
The chapel.
That old relic of a building that was the beginning and end to Spike's life, and that place where she'd gotten tangled in a history she'd rather not have known. The lower windows and great arched doors were all boarded up with a crude 'condemned' sign plastered to the side of the building—everything about this place was dead, and now the church itself had died along with Vicious and Julia and maybe even Spike…
A space between the boards left an opening at the door large enough to crawl through, and it was in front of this hole where Einstein stood, barking madly and only pausing to growl.
"ED!" Faye shouted, panic overtaking her in the manner it only did when Vicious was involved-and this building was everything that man had been.
"ED! Get out of there!" she shouted frantically into the shadowed crack, voice combining with Ein's barks. She quickly looked over her shoulder to see if Spike had caught up yet. He hadn't come into view yet, and Faye suddenly felt it was imperative she grab the kid and get her out before he arrived. "EDWARD!"
"Come in, Faye-Faye!"
"You come out!"
"Poppies! Poppies!"
She shouldn't go in, she knew that. This place wasn't hers, she didn't exist here except as a faded memory of a woman tied to a pillar, used as bait to draw all that really mattered into this chapel. It was a sick, enclosed world that she wasn't a part of, from a time between her two lives.
This was trespassing.
Taking a deep breath, Faye steadied herself on the rotting boards and climbed into the foyer. Get in, grab Ed, get out. She cast a fleeting glance back at Ein, who stared at her and whined pathetically. Even HE knew better than to go inside.
Walking though the vestibule, she pulled open one of the double doors and entered the main room.
The first thing that hit her was the smell. It was more than the stuffy, dusty scent of an abandoned building, it was suffocating and horrible. It smelled as if someone had tried to cover up road kill with perfume, and she walked in with a hand over her nose.
"What the…." She trailed off, meaning to finish with 'hell' but finding she couldn't get the word out, even in such a place as this.
Faye looked around in absolute shock. Yellow. Yellow everywhere. What must have been hundreds, maybe thousands, of small yellow poppy blossoms were growing everywhere. They covered the pews and the dirt covered aisle. They were under and on top of the altar, as if a sacrifice to the figure of Jesus on the cross hanging overhead. They surrounded the pillars and, Faye was horrified and disgusted to see, they covered the bodies of dead syndicate men who's corpses were already half eaten by who knew what insects. Yellow. The gross, mustard yellow of the opium poppies basked in the golden glow of no less than twenty sunlamps.
It was a sick dream of a flower garden, and Ed stood in the midst of it all looking oblivious but proud of herself. "Found the poppies, found them, found them!" she chanted. "Can Faye-Faye catch the bounty now?"
She'd been standing with her mouth hanging open, but Faye finally got her jaw to work and forced a smile. "Yes, Ed, good job," she replied weakly. "Now let's go—"
A sudden noise from upstairs caught the girl's attention. They both stared up at the ceiling, which was full of holes between the rafters, but saw nothing through the gaps.
"Ed, go outside," Faye ordered in a low voice, taking her gun out once more and heading for the stairs.
Edward watched her go, and when Faye-Faye disappeared into the shadows she headed for the door but something caught her eye—or her ear more likely. It was the unmistakable hum of a computer, and Ed immediately followed the sound to investigate.
Off to the side, under the bench of an old decaying organ, lay a girl not much older than herself. She was sprawled on the ground, eyes half open and glazed over a bit, but she was alive.
Ed crawled closer, poking and sniffing at the person before noticing the computer she'd been looking for a few feet away. It was a little laptop, sleeker but more archaic than Tomato, and from it extended cords that connected to something around the girl's neck.
"Nya?" Ed tilted her head to the side, remembering that video game Jet had bought once but wouldn't let her try because apparently it did something funny to the brain. "Game is bad-bad," she scolded the girl, who gave no reaction.
Reaching for the cords connected to the stranger's necklace, Ed made a buzzing sound and unplugged them.
~
Faye knew she probably should've just gotten out—that had been the plan—but there was someone else in this building. She could only think of two kinds of people who would come to this chapel—syndicate men (or ex ones), and poppy-planting bounties. If there was anyone left who would chase Spike, then she'd have to take care of him before the whole cycle started up again. And if it was Yolan Davis, she could catch him and find out where he got off telling Spike she was dead.
Faye entered the room just behind the large, stained glass window—which was now shattered and offering a view of the city framed with rainbow shards. The pale, predawn light illuminated the place just enough to see a little in each direction, but not enough for her to make out much detail out of the circle of light.
She took a few cautious steps into the room, looking around. This place too, was lined with bodies of men Spike had probably killed. She shuddered involuntarily as she remembered he and Vicious exchanging looks which, at that moment, seemed equally heartless.
Vicious. She could see the man's blood streaked sword catching the morning light at the border of the window's illuminating sphere. That knot in her stomach turned into a wranching pang of fear when she couldn't see a body next to the weapon, and she ran to the middle of the room to get a better look.
Stopping in front of the sword, she knelt down slowly to examine the object. It was definitely Vicious's, that much was for sure, and the blood? Faye would bet a thousand woolongs she didn't have that it was Spike's.
Despite herself, as if controlled by some outside phantom of the building, she reached a tentative hand towards the hilt, but froze midway. Faye brought her hands up, open palmed, by her head as she heard the unmistakable click and felt the cold steel from a gun pressed into her back.
"Nice to see you, Miss Valentine."
Faye felt she could've gone limp right then, but she did not. For a moment, for one horrid moment, she'd believed that it could very well be that indestructible monster of a man behind her, but when she heard the voice that was not Vicious's she felt so relieved she almost forgot about the gun in her spine altogether.
Staring into the shadows behind the sword, Faye saw the crumpled, white haired figure dead as he could be in a dark stain from a long dried pool of blood. It was over then. The past could finally be the past, and it was time to focus on what was going on now, like the man with a gun on her.
She didn't have to guess who this guy was, she recognized the voice from their one prior conversation in Earth's orbit. This was the assassin—the humiliating part was that she found him and not the other way around.
"What now?" she inquired, a sarcastic playfulness in her voice.
Her back was to him, but she could almost feel his smile. "We wait."
"For wha—" Faye lost her breath, and for one brief moment she was sure she'd been shot, although there's been no sound. In that second she'd felt cold and weak in every part of her, and then it vanished altogether.
But below her in the main room something was happening. She could barely register it from the poor view she had of the holes in the floor, but something was going on downstairs. The golden glow of the room underneath had increased, and a bright shimmering light seemed to radiate from everything, particularly from her own body.
Downstairs, Edward was watching as the poppy blossoms had opened all the way and released their glowing spores into the air like Venus gone ultra-violent. Next to her, the girl began to stir and make her way to consciousness, and outside Spike Spiegel stood with Einstein and watched the sky as pieces of it began to glow.
It looked like meteors at first, shinning in the atmosphere, but then they grew larger but not closer. It was light—that was the only way to describe it. Eerily silver-blue glowing pieces of light joined together and expanded, transforming into the appearance of Earth's long gone moon in the Martian sky.
To Be Continued
Hey all! So how was this chapter? Boring? Good? FREAKING LONG??? Well granted the parts with Yolan narrating may have been a bit dull, but I felt it was important that Spike not just appear out of nowhere or anything, and it wasn't as if the Yolan parts weren't about our fav characters so I hope it was forgivable, it's not like I'm going to do it again.
So, how about that ending scene? Did I confuse you? Oh goody goody gumdrops. Well all you really need to know is that it's the poppies that are making the moon appear. Why? Well I can't give that away now can I? How? Well that'll be in the next chapter.
The good news is I'm pretty much done with the set-up chapters so now the chaps are gonna be plot-full and stocked up with funky characterization psychological scenes. Fun!
Anywho, I'd like to say thank you to everyone who'd reviewed so far. Oh. And a lot of you nice reviewers have half written bebop stories that I'm waiting for the next chapters on! *'subtle' hint*
Please review! All the cool kids are doin it! (heh, lovely guilt trip/peer pressure thing there, huh?)
*ahem* ok so that wasn't true (yes it was)
I don't own so don't sue, mkay?
Chapter 4
~~*flashback*~~
The moon—the wrong moon for this red planet—finally faded away and left the sky looking as it should. The man trudged out of the abandoned apartment building, dragging his feet and trying not to stare at the little white flakes of light that fell from where the image had been. It looked so much like snow—beautiful shimmering snow—and he remembered home.
It didn't snow where he lived. It rained. It rained horrible little spores and seeds and pollen that glinted in the orange light of Venus and came down to kill the planet's people.
Come to think of it, it was the rain's fault for this whole mess. If it hadn't rained and hurt that girl the operation would never had happened.
But then again…
If she hadn't found him lying on the road that night he wouldn't have been there to pay for the operation in the first place and she'd be all right. Deformed, but all right.
But then again…
She'd been scared of him. It was her brother who'd seen he was alive and decided to take him in. If her brother hadn't saved him this whole thing wouldn't have happened.
But then again…
If he hadn't taken those drugs he'd never have needed saving. Which meant it was his fault. All his fault. The moon was gone now, that was a sign—another person was dead. That made the tenth.
And it was all his fault. Even if he hadn't been the one to pull the trigger, those ten were dead because of what he'd done. If that damn girl's damn brother hadn't been so damn good a person he would have been left to die like he should have, and none of this would have happened. It was all his fault.
The man clenched his fists and struck the side of the building with it. He was going to hell. He hadn't been able to save his savior. He hadn't been able to save one person—instead he'd killed ten and there were more just a phone call away. .
And then, inevitably at the worst of times, his communicator buzzed. He brought a limp hand to his inside pocket and drew out the mobile, not wanting to answer but knowing the consequences for his stupid stupid wants.
"Flowers dead?" asked the person on the other line. The devil, or his advocate, had stolen his soul and now he had to work off the debt.
"Of course they are," he answered. "They always die when you finish."
The advocate, a man by the name of Dismer, made a disgruntled noise. "Fine then, fine. You'll be heading off to earth then for the next target."
He winced. "Another? How many more?"
"What—exactly?" Dismer laughed a little for no real reason. He was a very cheerful man for someone so disgusting. "Two, if you must know." The tone of the advocate's voice changed, and he sounded like one of those imps from the clinics who spoke to him as if he needed to be calmed down. "Don't worry—I checked on your kid and she's fine. Two more and you'll both be free, I'll even help you out, if you help me like a good man."
"Where on earth to you want the poppies?"
"Singapore. There's this old wreck of a mansion, I'll email the address when I get it confirmed, but I expect my target to show up there within the month."
The man could only stare at the tiny comm. screen with a morbid look. "How do you figure?"
Dismer rolled his eyes. "You should know by now that I'm excellent at reading people. The target is a woman, and they're a sentimental species. She'll fly back home sooner or later."
"What if she's already there?"
The advocate chuckled, finding the man too humorous for words—although he had a dark sense of comedy to be sure. "Fine, have it your way," a picture of a woman with short dark hair and shifty eyes appeared on the little screen. "If you see her, hold her—you know the drill."
Nodding mutely, the man stared at the eyes of the next one to die, but she hadn't faced the camera and she didn't stare back. The picture was really a mug shot, and thus labeled with a name: Faye Valentine.
The man shuddered. This wasn't the first time he'd seen the face of the now-deceased, but this was the first time he'd known a name along with the picture. He hated to know. When he hadn't known the name it was just another person, another shadowed figure, just anyone he could pass or who could have passed him on the street. But having a name--that made you a person. That made a human exist, or so some part of him believed.
This Miss Valentine… he wished she was still a stranger to him.
"I'll be checking up on you," Dismer reminded him. "Don't have too much fun now," the voice mocked him a little, but it wasn't really hate filled. The advocate didn't care enough to really hate him or anyone really, but killing was Dismer's business and his dark sense of humor made it interesting.
Putting the comm. back in his pocket, the man continued to trudge down the Martian street, light from the shadow of a moon now completely gone. Dawn was coming, and it looked so disgustingly hopeful that he felt sure the sun was mocking him. He turned away from the brightness peeking through the buildings and heaved towards the port where he'd parked his little shuttle.
On his way, about half way up a hill, he passed the old chapel. The building was falling apart at the beams but nobody had ever bothered to do anything about it. The man knew there were rumors about that place, that bad people liked to come there, but even if the church was now a dark homestead he still felt the steeple's cross staring at him disapprovingly for all his sins.
But he wasn't alone this time. A small crowd of people stood around the courtyard in front of the chapel, all looking too nervous to more forward. All of them were watching the open doors leading to a shadowed interior that nobody could see through.
All of them watching, all of them quiet, all of them holding their breath as if waiting for something….
This was certainly a site for curious eyes. This crowd appeared to be Syndicate men. The man stopped a respectable distance behind all those men in their formidable black suits and trench coats and looked at the entryway to the chapel. He couldn't see what the others were staring at, or perhaps it hadn't shown up yet.
The silence felt eerie on the skin, and he found himself holding his breath like all the others. And then something happened. Some shadowed figure came walking slowly out into the light, and all the spectators had their eyes on this new person. They leaned forward, wondering, waiting, wanting an explanation….
This new person was a man covered in blood. His hair was tousled and cuts and bullet holes crossed his body in what appeared to be every place. Nobody rushed forward to help him. Everyone seemed to be waiting still, waiting for something.
The bloody man was smiling a mean, depressing grin and he raised a shaky arm. One eye closed, the other one staring into the faces of the crowd, his fingers formed a makeshift gun and he pretended to fire.
"Bang," said the new one, but our man standing at the back was the only one to jump at the penetrated silence.
The blood-coated visitor fell in a dead heap on the steps.
It seemed like time stood still for a moment. Someone from the crowd walked slowly forward, each step echoing off of walls that didn't exist, and he stopped in front of the bleeding body on the cement. Taking off his black jacket, the Syndicate man dropped it across the cadaver, then turning back to the others he nodded in the direction of the chapel doors. One by one, step by echoing step, the Syndicate men walked into the church leaving our man still standing in the street to stare in awe at whatever had just occurred.
He looked over to the black jacket, with trickles of blood flowing under the hem and down the stairs, and he felt a horrible sense of familiarity.
The steeple's cross watched him again, and he shuddered under the wait of a God he'd failed. Cautiously, he moved closer to the bloodied heap and lifted the jacket up a little. Automatically, he reached a hand down to check for a pulse. It took him a minute to realize that he'd found one: a slow, failing beat from a heart that wasn't even trying to live.
And the cross stared at him, and the scent of the poppies filled his nose, and the ghosts of those ten people whispered and he remembered he would go to hell because he hadn't saved them…
He stared at the man who was so close to becoming a corpse and remembered his own experiences. If he'd been left to die in the street, there were so many bad things that would never have happened. This man here on the steps… if he were to live would the consequences be bad as well?
But then again…
If he didn't save someone, he'd surely go to hell. So with that thought on his pitiful sliver of a mind, Yolan Davis took out his communicator and called for an ambulance.
~~*end flashback*~~
"So what happened to my ship?" Faye asked after she'd sufficiently calmed down.
"Impound lot." Spike replied, and it didn't look like he'd say anything else. He was reclining against a rough red Martian rock where they sat outside the tepee by the campfire, waiting for Ed to return from wherever she'd gone.
Faye wished he'd either say something else or just go to sleep. She'd had a good rest, although she still felt slightly ill, and didn't think she could sleep right away. There was so much on her mind right then, she couldn't settle back into the silence she'd enjoyed before their conversation had gotten too serious.
Spike hadn't returned because he thought there was nothing to return to… Faye began to muse on that thought. He said he told his rescuer—or rather her bounty, Mr. Davis--to find the Bebop, which meant that he'd intended to come back after all. But then again, there wasn't really another place Spike could go. Once he'd recovered, would he have left again?
The fact that he might have was so possible it made her feel rather afraid deep down to know that things might have ended up the same, Vicious or no. He'd done what he wanted, he got rid of his past once and for all, and he really didn't need her and Jet. He may have had nowhere else to go but the Bebop before, but now that he was free, Spike Spiegel could go out and find a place—anywhere he wanted! He didn't have to worry about the Syndicate dropping in after all…
But there he was, just sitting next to her. She certainly didn't need help any more, he could have left but he hadn't so maybe he would have stayed…yet…
Perhaps he knew, she realized. Perhaps he knew that it was her who had nowhere to go, and no will to find a place. Perhaps Spike was only sitting there with her, waiting for Radical Edward and her dog, because he felt a Jet-like urge to take in strays.
Or perhaps he wanted to return to the Bebop with her.
The different possibilities spun in Faye's mind until she couldn't even decide which was the more probable. "Spike?" it was her curiosity taking voice that made her address him, although the rest of her just preferred to sit and wonder.
"Hn?" he grunted, eyes still closed and cigarette between the lips.
She opened her mouth, intending to ask him what his plans were, but lost her nerve and closed it again. Eyes searching for an alternate topic of conversation, they landed on the tepee, and before she knew it she was asking him, "What do you think about wolves?"
Spike, caught off guard by the apparently random question, arched an eyebrow in slight confusion and opened his eyes. "What are you talking about?"
"Wolves," she replied curtly. "What's your opinion?"
He narrowed his eyes, now figuring she was up to something. "They're extinct now, right?" he asked carefully.
"Are they?" her voice sounded distracted.
"What brought this on?" Spike followed her gaze and his eyes landed on the tepee. He suddenly grinned slyly at her. "I get it, he gave you a nickname, didn't he? that old man…" he jerked his head towards Laughing Bull's tent.
Faye cracked a smile. "As a matter of fact he did."
"So what is it?"
" 'Sleeping Wolf', if you must know." The corners of her mouth turned up as the small smile turned to a smirk and she looked back at him. "Do ~you~ have a nickname?"
Spike, still looking amused, closed his eyes again and settled back into his previous position. " 'Swimming Bird'."
Faye blinked once, registering that, then gave a little laugh.
"What?"
"My animal can eat yours."
~~*Flashback*~~
Yolan tapped the keyboard, same key with the same finger, over and over again. He didn't know what he was doing, let alone where to start. Computers weren't his thing, nothing was actually, but now that he knew the name of the target he just had to know who she was.
A woman at the cyber café helped him log onto the YMCA website to look up old bounties. He told her he was a bounty hunter but she'd merely given him the smile-and-nod, obviously thinking he was some sort of ridiculous Cowboy aficionado. He had to admit he wasn't surprised, it wasn't as if he had the confidence or the build or even the air about him to get involved with the Y—so he just tapped the keys one at a time in an amateur fashion and browsed the website.
He was searching, desperately so, for something to ease his conscious. That picture of her was a mugshot, right? So she was a criminal. Perhaps she was a murderer—maybe she'd massacred someone and would have gotten the death penalty anyway so it would be no big deal if Dismer killed her. Maybe she deserved it!
But two hours of searching later, Davis lost hope. Faye Valentine was not a murderer. She was not on death row. In fact, the bounty on her head wasn't even active anymore—she was a bounty hunter herself! She was just a gambler and a cheater—a woman with human flaws not even bordering on his own. She was probably just minding her own business on that Bebop ship she was last registered at, or bringing a criminal to justice or something not worth being killed for.
So he was a criminal. An accessory to murder and a drug dealer and the two things he could say he'd done right with almost certainty was escaping weed and pulling some guy off the chapel steps—a man who was still unconscious back at the hotel and probably wouldn't even make it.
If he found this Faye, she'd probably turn him in for some woolongs before he could even warn her what was coming. But he couldn't warn her anyway. If he did, and if Dismer couldn't kill her, Margaret would never get that horrible collar off and things would get worse and worse.
She'd been growing more and more unstable, and the damage would be irreversible if that monitor wasn't removed soon not to mention the damage she could inflict on others with that disgusting gift of hers…
This had to stop, Yolan decided. It really did. Had it taken ten murders for him to finally crack under the pressure? No… he could keep going…just two more and it would be done with and when Margaret was free and able to take care of herself he could make up for everything by throwing himself off a building or something… just two more…
Yolan paid for his computer time and trudged back to the hotel, dragging his feet once again. . But when he opened the door he received his second piece of news: that man he'd saved, he was awake!
Lying on the ugly and now bloodstained sheets was the skinny, bandaged person, staring up at the ceiling and looking, well, bored.
At least this was good news. The guy could tell him who to call, and Yolan could finally get off of Mars and over to Earth to set the trap.
"Good! You're awake!" he cried, rushing over. "I guess that means you'll make it—I was really amazed you'd lived with all those injuries but still I wasn't optimistic in the least bit. I'm not that lucky, you know."
The man's eyes, weird looking reddish-brown ones, flicked over to give him a kind of sarcastic look as if to say: I'm here injured and you're complaining about YOUR luck? But instead all the man said, and with a generous amount of effort, was "Where?"
"You're on Mars," Yolan told him. "Not too far from where I found you, just a few blocks, actually." He paused, then pulled up the chair from the desk and sat backwards. He was smiling, which something in the back of his mind found odd. After all, with his life, why should he smile? But something had actually gone right. He'd saved a person! Sure Faye Valentine would die because of what he was going to do, but he'd at least saved this person and maybe that was enough for redemption.
"You were so beaten up, and with all those Syndicate men around-really! I'm curious, what happened to you?"
The man's expression was a mixture of 'who the hell is this guy' and 'this is completely the wrong time'.
"Well you're probably too tired to do anything right now so I'll call room service and have them bring up something—I think you're stomach's in one piece so you should get some food—oh! Hey, what's your name anyway?"
The man closed his eyes again, looking worn out but still very bored. "Spike Spiegel" he muttered almost bitterly but with definite casualness, then more to himself, "I haven't escaped myself yet."
~~*end flashback*~~
Jet frowned at the computer, and it "frowned" back, beeping and buzzing with annoying persistence as it tried to made sense out of the flower. He'd put Margaret's little gift through the data analyzer, but the machine couldn't make heads or tails out of it. One thing was clear: it might look like a poppy, and smell like a poppy, but it certainly was NOT a poppy.
Which brought across the question: what kind of drugs would a flower like this make?
At first he hadn't thought twice about it, but then he remembered something the detective had said. Those ten bodies Yolan was a suspect for had been covered in "poppy spores". The words had bothered him, and Jet couldn't figure out why until he took a good look at the flower Margaret had given him and realized something: poppies don't have spores.
Poppies reproduce though pollination, which meant that there was something up with this whole opium business. At first he'd figured that the kid had given him a different flower, but when he researched the subject he saw no outward difference between his dried souvenir and the picture of a real poppy on his computer.
Someone had made this plant to look like its narcotic producing twin—he said made, because the genetic structure had been altered and that didn't just happen on its own. The data analyzer hadn't seen anything like it: a plant with human DNA strands combined with some kind of chemical…
…"Apparently this flower gives off a hallucinogen," Jet was explaining to the Red Tail. He hadn't been able to find Faye, and she didn't answer her communicator, so he was leaving a message on her ship. "The spores go into the atmosphere and they are set to produce some kind of image, even out into space. I tried to make the image appear but apparently it needs to react with something else to work, I don't know what, and I don't think it'll work with the poppy I've got because it's dried.
The Red Tail didn't seem to care, and Jet glared at the communicator with anger and frustration. It would be just like Faye not to check in—well actually more like Spike; Faye was the one to leave without checking in and maybe call later. If a job went too long or too slow, Faye would often get bored and call in, usually talking to Edward.
It had been almost four days now without word from her, and Jet had started to worry a little until he remembered that this was Faye here. No matter what she did or where she went, leaving for good or for a job or what not, she always drifted back one way or another.
"I'll try to find out more, meet me on Ganymede, the bounty's headed there."
~~*Flashback*~~
And Spike had thought the Bebop's ceiling was ugly; it had nothing on this hotel.
He still couldn't move, in fact, he could hardly talk—not that he really felt like talking to that weird red-haired guy who'd apparently saved him.
It was so strange. For the first time in his life, Spike couldn't quite figure out what he was thinking. His thoughts kept drifting, landing on various things of extreme or little consequence.
If I'm alive, did Vicious make it? Where's my ship, anyway? What's the date? Damn this hurts…
Pain had been the strange surprise which had roused him from sleep. It wasn't as if he hadn't been hurt before, but normally, a few bumps and bruises and lacerations and bullets through various parts didn't seem to be that big a deal—well that may be overdoing things, but really, he'd been in more discomfort than actual pain.
Nerves of steel? No, he'd just been unable to feel. He'd dulled himself against emotional pain, but somewhere along the line, physical pain had subsided too, leaving him in a grey world of only half-sensations.
It wasn't as if, right then, things had gone from grey to rainbow, but blotches of pale colors seemed to be peeking through as he tried to move and found that a bullet through the arm hurt more than he remembered.
"I'm back!" and yet, the most persistent pain came from Spike's severe annoyance with this tanned fellow who still hadn't revealed his name. "How are you feeling?"
Spike stared at the man and for the first time realized he looked not unlike like a male, older Edward on steroids. "Disturbed."
The man raised an eyebrow in slight confusion, and then seemed to shrug it off. "Well you look better than yesterday… I think it would be safe to move you now…" The man looked jerky.
From the moment Spike had woken he'd noticed something odd about him. Red-head was always trying to look very calm and pleasant, but mere millimeters under the surface was some kind of frightened, twitching, animal wearing human skin. "A-anyway, I've got a family thing—Business, I've got business off world—I don't live on Mars you see, which explains the hotel and…" Finally giving up with attempted excuses, Red-head asked, "Is there someone I can call to get you?"
Spike stared, not at anything in particular, and felt his thoughts collide once more as his mind was bombarded with flashes of memory and scenarios.
He could picture it, and it was nothing glamorous, but what he knew would happen. He'd have to lie on that gross plastic couch, with Faye's ridicule and Jet's you-did-it-to-yourself commentary. If he tried to come back with any bits of sarcasm, the shrew would punch his injuries at such an angle that even he, buried deep as he could go in memories, could feel the pain from it.
And they would yell at him, and Faye would just about blow her top and probably storm off the ship with his money, headed for a casino.
And he could just hear her. She'd give him a lecture—she'd do it as often as she could before he could walk again—and she'd tell him what an idiot he was for getting himself into such a mess and she would remind him that she warned him and she'd say "I told you so". She'd probably give him another punch for good measure, and Jet would roll his eyes, pretending he wasn't completely amused.
Somehow, for reasons Spike wasn't sure of, the thoughts of those two giving him a hard time took some weight off his mind as he rolled his eyes at the visions and imagined comebacks to their sarcasm. But the pain from his various injuries seemed to have increased a little.
"Well, I suppose you could call the ship I lived on," Spike told Redhead, breathing through the pain and craving a cigarette.
"All right then!" the man seemed incredibly relieved. "What's the name of the ship?"
"The Bebop."
There was a pause. "Bebop, you said?" Spike couldn't name the look on Redhead's face, but it was pretty close to a twitching panic and he began to mutter something about a woman before he replied, "I think that's the name of the ship that crashed into Callisto, I'm sorry."
It happened so fast it was almost unexpected, but the pain faded from his scaring skin and simmered down into a minorly distracting throb. It was as if he could already feel the broken bones speed their healing. Spike didn't even realize everything looked gray again; he merely perceived it as normal. The chaos in his mind ceased, replaced with only a few stray thoughts.
Dead, huh? Figures; something like that was bound to happen.
So what now?
Dimly he recalled the last time he'd thought that. It had been just after Julia; before he'd met Jet, and even before he'd become a cowboy. He'd been reclining on a park bench close to dawn, in this very city in fact, dead tired and just out of the hospital—or whatever you'd call that place.
His cigarette had almost burned completely, and the city looked incredibly unfocused and dismal in the pale sunbeams that peeked though before their source. But maybe it hadn't been the sky, but his brand new eye not appreciating the aesthetics of it—then again, he couldn't appreciate much at that time, and little more since.
He'd let the smoke add to the grey blur of the town, and he'd wondered: what now?
~*end flashback*~
Faye's patience had run out hours ago. The sun would rise within the hour and Ed—who according to Spike had gone off exploring when she was forbidden help with the injured Faye-Faye—was still unaccounted for, and neither was the dog.
"Why don't you call her?" asked Spike in a slightly irritated fashion. He sat on a log aside the dying fire, absently watching Faye pace.
Making some sort of noise that bordered on primal, Faye threw her communicator at him, which he caught. "It's that piece of junk," she snapped. "I don't know what happened to it but it hasn't worked for days."
Spike turned the comm. over in his hands, eyeing it with casual interest. He pressed the call button but nothing happened although the reception registered as good. "You should take better care of your things if you don't know how to repair them," he commented, and she stopped her pacing mid step to glare at him with a slightly twitching eye. He sent her the standard smile for a standard hissy-fit.
Faye strode over with stiff steps and snatched the device back and then, throwing it on the ground, she took out her gun and aimed it at the comm..
"What are you doing?" Spike asked, raising an eyebrow and looking amused.
"Fixing it," replied Faye, flashing a grin over her shoulder. "The Spike Spiegel way—or should I kick it first?"
Raising his hands in mock surrender, and with a noise something between a sigh and a laugh, Spike stood up and moved toward her. "Fine, fine, you've made your point now don't waist good machinery."
"Well," Faye resigned, hiding her weapon again and picking up the communicator, "If the kid ever shows up she can probably make it work." She shoved it in her jacket pocket next to her deck of cards. "Guess that leaves waiting."
Eyeing Faye as she sat down again, trying to make herself comfortable, Spike gave an exasperated sigh and stuffed his hands in his pockets. "Well come on," he ordered, starting to walk towards the dock entry in the direction of the main road. "We can call her from my hotel."
"Hotel?" Faye echoed loudly, jumping up. "Why didn't you say that earlier?! We wouldn't have had to sleep on the ground!" She jogged to catch up with him before matching his strides with her hands on her hips.
Spike shrugged. "I figured Ed would be back sooner," he replied, but not in a tone that was trying to defend him.
Faye made a growling noise and muttered things about stupid men and their stupid logic. "What happened to your communicator? We could've called from here if you had your heart set on sleeping on rocks."
He shrugged again. "Don't carry it with me."
She opened her mouth with every intention of telling him how stupid that was—what if there was an emergency et cetera—but caught herself just in time as she realized the reason. He'd left his comm. behind because he had nobody to call. For the past few weeks, Spike had been—or at least thought he was—completely alone.
Trotting slightly behind him now, Faye's mind began to drift back to the times before the Bebop. She'd always carried her cellular phone—it took her a long time to think of it more as a science fiction device than a phone—just in case. She'd gone through a few partners in crime, and kept a few contacts on her good side, but normally she'd worked alone. But she'd made and received plenty of calls either way, always talking to bookies and establishments wanting to hire the famous Poker Alice.
But Spike wasn't the type to get into that kind of trouble—he got into trouble of course, but not her particular kind. Spike had a manner about him that allowed him to easily slip in and out of a conversation, and Faye realized for the first time how lucky he was to have such a talent. Without that, he would have spent all his time in silence, which is cruel even for someone who prefers solitude.
Again Faye wondered what Spike was planning. After she called Ed, she planned on calling Jet and giving him the news about their not-all-that-dead comrade. She could just imagine the old man throwing a fit worse than she could ever do and going all parental on the bounty hunter's sorry butt.
'What makes you think you can just come back after that stunt you pulled?', Faye could just hear Jet say that, but of course they both wanted Spike back not to mention Ed and Ein.
But would Spike come back? Would he continue to be a cowboy, the notorious occupation for those who have nothing left? Would he even want to stay once again on a fishing boat with no meat and nothing to offer but the people who'd put his communicator to use?
Spike...
"Hey…" Faye started, catching his attention.
"Hn?" he didn't turn to look at her, but she knew that he was paying attention.
Faye opened her mouth, and shut it again, not sure of how to start. She doubted she'd ever get the hang of serious conversations with the Lunkhead, and suddenly felt grateful that he wasn't facing her, for her expression was bound to look dumb.
She opened her mouth intending to just adlib her way through as usual. "I—AGGH!"
"FAYE-FAYEEEEEE!" Ed cried. She'd jumped Faye from behind and her slinky arms were wrapped around the older woman's neck, much in the same way she'd tackled Spike the day before.
"What's the big idea?!" Faye detangled herself and forced Ed to a normal standing position. "Don't do that to people—and where have you been anyway?!"
But Edward refused to stand still. She began to jump and prance around, an aggravated looking corgi barking at her heels. "Ed has found them! Ed has found them!"
"Found what?" inquired Spike, walking over to the girls.
Faye'd finally managed to grab the child's shoulders, but Ed's head was still rolling this way and that. "Poppies, Ed found!" she announced proudly.
Spike gave Faye a questioning look, and for a moment she appeared just as confused, but then she remembered the job she'd given the kid back on Earth. "Hold it, are you serious?" she shook the girls shoulders, but it didn't seem to help her attention span. "Where are they?"
"Ed will show you!" With a military salute and a smile, Edward wriggled out of Faye's grasp and bounded down the street, Ein in hot pursuit.
"Hey! Hold on!" Faye shouted, but knowing that wouldn't help, she began to run after the pair.
She'd run at least two blocks before the thought came to her that if she lost track of him, she might not find Spike again. She still didn't know if he intended to come back to the Bebop with her or not, now that he didn't need to be patched up anymore, and he'd been sticking around with her to wait for Ed before and now Ed had arrived. So was that all? Faye wondered if he'd just shrug them off like he did everything else and head to his hotel—which she didn't know how to find either. But when she looked over her shoulder, she caught a glimpse of Spike just rounding the corner.
He was following. Not joining in the ridiculous chase, but trailing them. He'd walk quickly when they were in a straight line and within his vision, and when Faye followed Ed around a corner he'd pick up the pace just enough to turn along with them and watch them down the next straight road.
Faye smiled, but her relief melted into nervousness as the path Ed led her on began to look familiar. She'd taken this road before, in a car however, and not because she'd wanted to come.
This couldn't possibly be…
Almost at once, as the knot in her stomach tightened, she found she'd lost track of Edward. Ein's frantic barking however, was enough to lead her to the place some part of her mind knew she'd end up again.
The chapel.
That old relic of a building that was the beginning and end to Spike's life, and that place where she'd gotten tangled in a history she'd rather not have known. The lower windows and great arched doors were all boarded up with a crude 'condemned' sign plastered to the side of the building—everything about this place was dead, and now the church itself had died along with Vicious and Julia and maybe even Spike…
A space between the boards left an opening at the door large enough to crawl through, and it was in front of this hole where Einstein stood, barking madly and only pausing to growl.
"ED!" Faye shouted, panic overtaking her in the manner it only did when Vicious was involved-and this building was everything that man had been.
"ED! Get out of there!" she shouted frantically into the shadowed crack, voice combining with Ein's barks. She quickly looked over her shoulder to see if Spike had caught up yet. He hadn't come into view yet, and Faye suddenly felt it was imperative she grab the kid and get her out before he arrived. "EDWARD!"
"Come in, Faye-Faye!"
"You come out!"
"Poppies! Poppies!"
She shouldn't go in, she knew that. This place wasn't hers, she didn't exist here except as a faded memory of a woman tied to a pillar, used as bait to draw all that really mattered into this chapel. It was a sick, enclosed world that she wasn't a part of, from a time between her two lives.
This was trespassing.
Taking a deep breath, Faye steadied herself on the rotting boards and climbed into the foyer. Get in, grab Ed, get out. She cast a fleeting glance back at Ein, who stared at her and whined pathetically. Even HE knew better than to go inside.
Walking though the vestibule, she pulled open one of the double doors and entered the main room.
The first thing that hit her was the smell. It was more than the stuffy, dusty scent of an abandoned building, it was suffocating and horrible. It smelled as if someone had tried to cover up road kill with perfume, and she walked in with a hand over her nose.
"What the…." She trailed off, meaning to finish with 'hell' but finding she couldn't get the word out, even in such a place as this.
Faye looked around in absolute shock. Yellow. Yellow everywhere. What must have been hundreds, maybe thousands, of small yellow poppy blossoms were growing everywhere. They covered the pews and the dirt covered aisle. They were under and on top of the altar, as if a sacrifice to the figure of Jesus on the cross hanging overhead. They surrounded the pillars and, Faye was horrified and disgusted to see, they covered the bodies of dead syndicate men who's corpses were already half eaten by who knew what insects. Yellow. The gross, mustard yellow of the opium poppies basked in the golden glow of no less than twenty sunlamps.
It was a sick dream of a flower garden, and Ed stood in the midst of it all looking oblivious but proud of herself. "Found the poppies, found them, found them!" she chanted. "Can Faye-Faye catch the bounty now?"
She'd been standing with her mouth hanging open, but Faye finally got her jaw to work and forced a smile. "Yes, Ed, good job," she replied weakly. "Now let's go—"
A sudden noise from upstairs caught the girl's attention. They both stared up at the ceiling, which was full of holes between the rafters, but saw nothing through the gaps.
"Ed, go outside," Faye ordered in a low voice, taking her gun out once more and heading for the stairs.
Edward watched her go, and when Faye-Faye disappeared into the shadows she headed for the door but something caught her eye—or her ear more likely. It was the unmistakable hum of a computer, and Ed immediately followed the sound to investigate.
Off to the side, under the bench of an old decaying organ, lay a girl not much older than herself. She was sprawled on the ground, eyes half open and glazed over a bit, but she was alive.
Ed crawled closer, poking and sniffing at the person before noticing the computer she'd been looking for a few feet away. It was a little laptop, sleeker but more archaic than Tomato, and from it extended cords that connected to something around the girl's neck.
"Nya?" Ed tilted her head to the side, remembering that video game Jet had bought once but wouldn't let her try because apparently it did something funny to the brain. "Game is bad-bad," she scolded the girl, who gave no reaction.
Reaching for the cords connected to the stranger's necklace, Ed made a buzzing sound and unplugged them.
~
Faye knew she probably should've just gotten out—that had been the plan—but there was someone else in this building. She could only think of two kinds of people who would come to this chapel—syndicate men (or ex ones), and poppy-planting bounties. If there was anyone left who would chase Spike, then she'd have to take care of him before the whole cycle started up again. And if it was Yolan Davis, she could catch him and find out where he got off telling Spike she was dead.
Faye entered the room just behind the large, stained glass window—which was now shattered and offering a view of the city framed with rainbow shards. The pale, predawn light illuminated the place just enough to see a little in each direction, but not enough for her to make out much detail out of the circle of light.
She took a few cautious steps into the room, looking around. This place too, was lined with bodies of men Spike had probably killed. She shuddered involuntarily as she remembered he and Vicious exchanging looks which, at that moment, seemed equally heartless.
Vicious. She could see the man's blood streaked sword catching the morning light at the border of the window's illuminating sphere. That knot in her stomach turned into a wranching pang of fear when she couldn't see a body next to the weapon, and she ran to the middle of the room to get a better look.
Stopping in front of the sword, she knelt down slowly to examine the object. It was definitely Vicious's, that much was for sure, and the blood? Faye would bet a thousand woolongs she didn't have that it was Spike's.
Despite herself, as if controlled by some outside phantom of the building, she reached a tentative hand towards the hilt, but froze midway. Faye brought her hands up, open palmed, by her head as she heard the unmistakable click and felt the cold steel from a gun pressed into her back.
"Nice to see you, Miss Valentine."
Faye felt she could've gone limp right then, but she did not. For a moment, for one horrid moment, she'd believed that it could very well be that indestructible monster of a man behind her, but when she heard the voice that was not Vicious's she felt so relieved she almost forgot about the gun in her spine altogether.
Staring into the shadows behind the sword, Faye saw the crumpled, white haired figure dead as he could be in a dark stain from a long dried pool of blood. It was over then. The past could finally be the past, and it was time to focus on what was going on now, like the man with a gun on her.
She didn't have to guess who this guy was, she recognized the voice from their one prior conversation in Earth's orbit. This was the assassin—the humiliating part was that she found him and not the other way around.
"What now?" she inquired, a sarcastic playfulness in her voice.
Her back was to him, but she could almost feel his smile. "We wait."
"For wha—" Faye lost her breath, and for one brief moment she was sure she'd been shot, although there's been no sound. In that second she'd felt cold and weak in every part of her, and then it vanished altogether.
But below her in the main room something was happening. She could barely register it from the poor view she had of the holes in the floor, but something was going on downstairs. The golden glow of the room underneath had increased, and a bright shimmering light seemed to radiate from everything, particularly from her own body.
Downstairs, Edward was watching as the poppy blossoms had opened all the way and released their glowing spores into the air like Venus gone ultra-violent. Next to her, the girl began to stir and make her way to consciousness, and outside Spike Spiegel stood with Einstein and watched the sky as pieces of it began to glow.
It looked like meteors at first, shinning in the atmosphere, but then they grew larger but not closer. It was light—that was the only way to describe it. Eerily silver-blue glowing pieces of light joined together and expanded, transforming into the appearance of Earth's long gone moon in the Martian sky.
To Be Continued
Hey all! So how was this chapter? Boring? Good? FREAKING LONG??? Well granted the parts with Yolan narrating may have been a bit dull, but I felt it was important that Spike not just appear out of nowhere or anything, and it wasn't as if the Yolan parts weren't about our fav characters so I hope it was forgivable, it's not like I'm going to do it again.
So, how about that ending scene? Did I confuse you? Oh goody goody gumdrops. Well all you really need to know is that it's the poppies that are making the moon appear. Why? Well I can't give that away now can I? How? Well that'll be in the next chapter.
The good news is I'm pretty much done with the set-up chapters so now the chaps are gonna be plot-full and stocked up with funky characterization psychological scenes. Fun!
Anywho, I'd like to say thank you to everyone who'd reviewed so far. Oh. And a lot of you nice reviewers have half written bebop stories that I'm waiting for the next chapters on! *'subtle' hint*
Please review! All the cool kids are doin it! (heh, lovely guilt trip/peer pressure thing there, huh?)