Chapter 15
"Where do we go from here?" Jonny asked Ed in a figurative and literal sense.
Their lovemaking subsided, the rushing pulse of the spaceship and the veins. Their young bodies heaved away from one another, no longer aching for inexplicably immediate gratification. She was still partially unclothed when he asked her the question. Bare and protruding were her naked flesh and soul.
"Well," she paused, "that's like asking what are my hopes and dreams."
"What are your hopes and dreams?"
She smiled, "I'll tell you when I figure it out."
He nodded, well aware she would not lie. Ed's situation suddenly became apparent to Jonny, and he pitied her a little.
"You know, Ed, something about your eyes."
She nodded, as if he had found the answer to the universe.
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For Faye Valentine, life was business as usual. Getting drunk in a seedy bar, full of seedy people.
Unhappy. That was what she had become. She no longer denied her feelings, her purposes. She attempted to piece together the information she had received earlier to an avail she wished she did not have to arrive at. She had a microchip implanted into her wrist which was a link to funds capable of reforming the Red Dragons. Dark men were after her, presumably after this very chip. Her husband had told her to consult YAN, which was precisely what she meant to do. What, then, stopped her from giving herself up right away? She contemplated her decisions, and the only reason she could fathom was a bleak one.
The Red Dragons had tried to kill Spike. They would strike once more, if given enough power. She couldn't bear losing him again.
But had she not already lost him? She must have, but only now did the reality of the fact that "she lost him" begin to sink in. I lost him, I lost him, I lost him, sang her mind. When she ran away that night, leaving behind her verbose good-bye letter, so unlike her usual self, she thought that it was he who had lost her. Deep within, she was filled with a galvanizing desire that he would seek her out again, pour his heart out, swear that he had forgotten about Julia, and take her in his arms. But was it fair to feed herself on miracles?
She drank.
It was there in that bar that for a moment, for a brief pitfall in time, she remembered that she had loved him. Loved him the way some people love their mothers; the way a dreamer loves the stars; as if, the way she wished he could have held her could lift her off the ground to which she was compelled by the laws of gravity. Loved him like a crisp autumn day, like fleeting happiness, the gossamer wings of enchanted human crimes. Loved him like she was ready to break into song, or kiss somebody empty, empty places. Loved him the way a human being can love a human being, needed him the way he'd never understand. All at that moment, that little moment, that little drift through the perverse tundra of time.
She drank.
No matter her love for Spike, Faye knew it wasn't only he that challenged her desire to drop the chip and run. The Red Dragons, a deadly, bloody crime Syndicate. Destruction of the innocent, exploitation, terror. Did she want all that on her conscience? If she had been her old self, she might have shrugged and took time as it were. But she was not her old self, Spike had changed her. He had changed her with words, simple words.
"You're better disappointing people, at never keeping your promises, standing up for what you believe, or taking responsibility for your foolish actions. You're better at being afraid, being afraid of anything that requires any human sensitivity or dignity," he had said to her with his familiar fire the last time they were together. She believed what he said. She accepted it as truth. Only later would she begin to question him, only later would she wonder if human beings could change. She was young and beautiful inside when she died in a space shuttle accident. When she was reborn, she retained the qualities. They must have still lingered within her: Righteousness, Courage, Responsibility. Maybe she didn't have these qualities at all. Maybe she could develop them, prove to Spike that there was more to her than she let on. Prove to Spike that she was a new person, that she had all that he must have loved in Julia.
She knew she had to rid herself of the chip in her veins. She knew she had to destroy it, with it destroying the Red Dragons legacy. She knew it would cost her life. She didn't care.
Faye was aware that Spike would never come back. He would never love her, never care. She was prepared for that heartbreak. All she wanted before dying was to prove to him that he was wrong about her. She wanted to prove that she was basicly good, as all humans are at birth. She needed him to know what he had meant to her, even if she hadn't meant the same to him.
She drank, and as she drank, she thought "Like that old song."
It was about a woman who had loved a man like happiness, a man who, just like happiness, did not love her. And all she ever wanted out of life, was to walk a few steps along the edge of his fate. Just to leave a mark, no matter how insignificant. To be, no matter her lopsidedness, upon the horizon of his life. To mean. Just to walk a little ---just a little bit---along the edge of his fate.
And she couldn't help still feeling that she lost him, even though she never had him in the first place.
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"You wanted to run away," Jonny said, "for this."
They were swinging in the wee hours of rolling days. A drunken haze of playgrounds. If anything, the simple minded hiss of distant voices. And of course, the stars.
The powdered evening, made more opalescent still by the sea of lit abdomens that encircled them. The respective shoes of their respective feet dug into the mossy ground beneath their respective frames as Jonny and Ed tried to mitigate the frantic rocking of the silly little swings. The trees lined the little kingdom like chivalrous knights. Chivalry is dead, she'd say.
And oh, that green grass gown of Mother Nature!
Within the rite of passage dream, they swung. Swung like mortality was chasing them. Like the droopy smile of lustful sunset deepened their many physical and metaphorical unbandaged scars.
"For this," he repeated, his tone not reprehensible but rather understanding. Was this beauty what life was all about? An empty playground on a beautiful summer night. Divine innocence, made even more divine because, despite the misconceptions, it never really disappeared. It lived on in the chambers of hearts of every human being. Loss of innocence is an oxymoron, she'd say.
"Tell me where we go from here, Ed," he said, demandingly now, "tell me or I'll have to walk away."
She sighed, extending her hand and spreading her palm as if to feel the velvet sky. She could sense the very fabric of the stars as they sifted through her fingers. In the moonlight, her skin was happiness and her soul was freedom, but she knew full well that he would give up the dream if she didn't offer him a platefull of reality. In a funny sort of way, she wanted him in her life.
"Ed and Jon-person must find Faye-Faye," she said with a smile, "Ed must help Faye-Faye before the Dark Men come."
-----
"Company?" said a deep, kind voice of a man. She turned franticaly to see Spike's face.
It wasn't there. It was, instead, the antithesis to Spike. A handsome young man with blue eyes and blonde hair was smiling at her. His facial expression was warm and comforting, and for a moment, she couldn't breathe altogether. She regained her frantic thought, however, and gave him a cool look of indifference. He did not believe her mannerism and continued staring in his aloof way at her shaking lips.
"Can I help you?" she asked coolly, still glaring with her hungry eyes.
"You always this friendly?" the stranger asked. She stared at the intensity of his gaze, somehow enchanted. He was as pale as daylight, and his eyes were cold, yet it incited a warmness within her frame. She contemplated his dry lips, that she almost wished to feel upon hers, anything to keep her from crying out how much she hated that he wasn't Spike.
"Of course not."
He smiled, "Then something must be up?"
She thought for another moment whether or not to open up to this kind and beautiful stranger. As well him as any, she concluded.
"You can say that," Faye revealed. The simple statement was harder to utter than any that would follow.
"Falling out with a boyfriend?" it was as if he hit a nail on the head, though an incorrect one at that.
Faye grunted.
"Hmm...a friend then?" the stranger continued.
"Friends?" she shuddered, "who needs them?" It was then that she remembered a similar conversation that she once had with a different beautiful stranger. Back when things were still the same. Back when the Bebop still existed. "Who has them nowadays?" she added.
"I do," was his simple response.
She nodded,"Oh."
"I take it you don't?" he asked.
"Can't say I do. Nor do I want any. Friends are trouble, 'cause in the end, they look out for themselves. So I hand my trust over on a silver platter, only to see someone's back as they walk away from me. To go and discover themselves...all this hypothetically speaking, of course. So it is best to be alone. Loneliness is warm, you know. That's a real misconception."
"But it must be hard sometimes, at least when you want a conversation."
"Conversation is overrated," she said, "you can talk to a person for hours without ever saying anything. It's just a way to...fill up empty space. No, no. Conversation is irrevelant in the real world. It's quiet that human beings really need. It's being able to look into someone's eyes and hear more than their voice could ever allow."
She paused, closing her eyes and seeing Spike's image imprinted on her retina. His quiet look, the last one he gave her before he went to fight Vicious. "Look into my eyes," he had said to her, and when she did, she no longer needed to hear much of anything else. She only needed to look into his eyes. His eyes.
"Dialogue means very little in the general scheme of things," she mused, "The only tongue humans ever need to know is---the language of silence---what is proclaimed by the eyes, not the vocal chords."
That's all.
------
"Do you love me, Julia?" Spike asked her once.
Gwen closed her eyes and wrapped her legs around her insufficient blankets. She tossed and turned, remembering the past---or perhaps the future?
And with a sigh, she drifted into a memory.
He smiled again. The same warm smile. They went on making polite conversation that felt like making love. She was suddenly sprawled over her bed, her conservative blouse unbuttoned, innocent eyes staring at his ravenous demeanor as he buried his hands in the locks of her hair. She prepared for penetrations (the mind and the vulva), and whispered a sweet "no" she was well aware he would ignore, as she wanted him to. And after he taught her the fusion of cognitive aptitudes and overlapping of cocked erectility in all its puissant glory, they were suddenly dressed again and staring at each other with their raving, loudmouth loins over the oceanic stretch of her imitation-oak kitchen table.
He handed her a vial of red eye as if he was offering her happiness, and their hearts momentarily touched with the coming-together of their decorative sleeves. His periphrastic dialect reverberated up her vertebrate (to think this jubilation was verbatim) and into the very core of her profuse inhibitionism. He said his short farewell (the shorter the better, for long farewells infuse wells of tears and only fools find tragedy amusing) and walked out of her apartment as if he was walking out of her life. As she heard the melodic malady of the shutting door to the chambers of the building and the heart, she tingled with a breathtaking, miniature agony and foreboding. Momentarily, the clock announced midnight and apocalypse.
And then Spike asked her, "Do you love me, Julia?"
"Vicious," she had replied.
He supposed it was her fear that drove her to say such a name at such a time. He was only partially correct. Did Julia love Spike? Perhaps. The way a dreamer loved the stars, the way the sun loved the earth, the way the moon loved the ceiling. But Vicious. She loved him in her own way, the unhealthy sort of way in which she knew that love would hurt her but never gave up seeking it. She loved Vicious like she loved death, like she loved her father, like she loved the universe and all of its intricacies. She loved Vicious like sin, and Spike like her salvation.
She half-loved them both because, when together, they were one. Tango for three? Oh but it was really tango for one. Julia, Spike, and Vicious were each one third of a human being. Each dependent one one another in a symbiotic usage ritual. No wonder a rift in the system of one had caused a domino effect in the others. But Vicious, Spike, and Julia were gone. Vicious was dead, Spike was a heartless monster, and Julia had become Gwen.
Gwen knew Spike was alive. She had been told by her last connection in the syndicate, a man named James Shields. He was the one responsible for her wretched life in the first place. It was he that arrived to Anastasia's and found Julia with a bullet in her back some moments after Spike had departed in hopelessness and before Vicious arrived with his subordinates after having taken over the syndicate. It was he that secretly transferred her to a hospital on a distant star and later established her identity as Gwen the waitress on a forlorn asteroid. And then he died, and Julia knew why he died. She also knew that Spike had been saved as well, and had spent nearly two years in hiding on Ganymede, where he led a life of self-destructive futility, consuming recreational drugs like oxygen and wishing he were dead like she and Vicious. Spike, unlike Julia, was not told of the living third. It was Julia's idea. She asked Shields to keep her existence private; she didn't want Spike to know. Their love had caused too much trouble in the past.
So, Gwen continued living like one third of a human being on a dirty asteroid.
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Faye was drunk, and to the farthest extent of her knowledge, the beautiful stranger was taking her somewhere. She leaned on his shoulder, closing her eyes in a friendly and friendless abandon. He pulled his arms around her waist and moved her body in conjunction to his out of the bar and into the dark street. They continued walking for several moments, broken streetlights only shading their perilous journey of meters, before Faye stopped for a moment and stared into his eyes.
"Can I tell you a secret?" she asked quietly.
He nodded.
"I'm drunk."
They continued walking before a parked spaceship appeared before their very eyes. The stranger tried to move her through the door. It was there that Faye came to her senses.
"No!" she exclaimed, "I don't want to go in there!"
"Yes you do," he said kindly.
"No! I don't!" she screamed.
"Yes you do!" he screamed back.
Faye noticed the hardness of his grip on her flesh. She began fighting to get out, throwing her arms up, dropping like dead weight on the floor and trying to kick him with her legs. He was quicker, pulling her up and slapping her accross the face until she was nearly unconscious. Faye stopped putting up a fight and felt him load her feeble body into the ship and prop it up against a cold metal wall.
She saw his dark outline against the dimly lit street that portruded through the open door. It looked so familiar, she thought.
"Hello, Miss Valentine," the dark man said and Faye began to shudder.
The door behind him closed, and after that---darkness.