Disclaimer: I do not own Cowboy Bebop, and have no intention of gaining monetary profit from this story. It's all for the love.
A/N: Well, I'm back. As Adelaide E so put it, I felt like a criminal to leave this as it was. It seemed so...incomplete, I guess. I feel a little better now; there's not so many loose ends. Plus, I didn't want to stop writing dor this fic, because I had so much fun with it. This chapter would have been up sooner - when I read everyone's reviews, ideas began to form, but every time I sat down to write, my mother bustled into the room and demanded I go to bed at once. = =;
I just want to thank everyone who had read and reveiwed (even if you just read and didn't reveiw). The comments put me into the mind that another chapter couldn't hurt. Your encouragement means alot to me. Thanks again, and enjoy!
To Live Again
by Siluial
"He was owned by various people who he didn't really care for. The cat wasn't afraid to die. Then one day the cat became a stray cat which meant he was free."
And yet, deep down, he wondered if he would ever truly be free.
She had said: "It's all a dream."
To which he had replied: "Yeah, just a dream."
---
He could remember that moment so clearly in his mind, everything vivid and crisp, like a freshly pressed flower yet to dry, the memory, the image, remained, retaining a beauty that he would have never admitted to seeing.
Looking up, and seeing a watery green, not comprehending, mind fuzzy and a bit black around the edges.
Funny. He had thought that hell would be red.
Slowly, his eyes had grown sharper, his sight more reliable, and he recognized that shiny green. And inside, thoughts jumbled about his head, unfinished, overthought, fragmented and whole and utterly confusing. He tasted metal on his
lips, and licked them again, trying to moisten them, drawing that metallic taste further into his mouth. He had tasted that before, oh yes, many many times, he knew that taste like the back of his hand, like living in a place so long that
you could walk about with your eyes closed and in the dark, maneuvering around furniture you could see in your mind's eye and not bumping you shins or stubbing your toes on anything.
He gazed upwards, into the green, then to the paleness that surrounded it, then to the inky purple that was about all of it. And as his mind confirmed what he saw, knowing it from his memory, he felt a keen sense of disappoinment, so sharp that if felt like it was cutting his gut into ribbons and nicking his heart, which he shouldn't have been able to hear beating, pounding loudly in his ears.
Something flitted across his mind quickly, a thread of a memory, a peice of a conversation. Another followed, and another, until his mind was racing with things he was struggled to understand, but he didn't - couldn't - understand, because when one resides on the narrow bridge between life and death as long as he had, the mind slowly prepares to let go of it's memories, and it is nearly impossible to remember everything all at once upon returning from the bridge to the land of the living.
Ther result made him feel like a kid again, still trying to find his place in the universe, among its people and its planets.
"Everyone - they've all lost their sense of place in the world. Like kites without strings or tails."
And like those kites, he was drifting through the blue.
---
His ties with the past were gone. Blown away, not by the wind, no, that was too cliche and sentimental. His life had been many things, but it wasn't what you would find in a fluffy romance novel. No, they were blown away with explosions and smoke and fire and bullets and blood. Blown away by his proclaimation of "bang" upon those torn and broken stairs, from, it seemed, lifetimes ago, before he had fallen and dreamed and then awoken.
He had blown them away because he didn't want to remember anymore. It had just hurt to damn much, like holding a precious gem, only to find that it was as hot as lava, or picking a rose and being stabbed by the thorns. But mostly because
("You told me to forget the past, 'cause it doesn't matter. But you're the one still tied to the past, Spike!")
there had been something nagging at the back of his mind
(There had been tears in her eyes)
that had sunk its hooked claws into him and wouldn't let go, no matter how hard he tried to shake it off.
And so here he was, alive and whole and well.
He had stretched out onto the couch, arms folded behind his head and one leg crossed over the other, eyes lazily following the circular sweep of the ceiling fan's blades. The VidScreen droned in the background, the small fridge in the corner hummed softly. A lit and crumpled cigarette jutted from his lips, but he had nearly forgotten all about it.
His ties with the past were gone, yes, but why was his mind having so much trouble getting rid of the memories? He couldn't help but see her face, that angel-from-hell devil-from-heaven face ringed by a gold crown. Every time he tried to push the past from his conscious mind, she appeared and the whole thing went amoot.
"He met a white female cat, and the two of them spent their days together happily. Well, years passed, and the wite cat grew weak and died of old age."
Julia.
Christ, how he missed her.
She had saved him and condemned him in the same breath. But God, how he had loved her. Spike wasn't known for his romantic qualities (not, at least, among his ship mates), but when he loved, he loved hard. He had gone without her for years, learning to live with her not there, and now that he had seen her again, all the walls of his carefully constructed world had come down about him. Now that she was gone, he wasn't sure if he could live again. Sure, he had lived without her, but he had never lived without her.
(Yes, but: "Why did you love me?")
He had never fully appreciated the prescence of others until she had come around, and now he was alone again. And it hurt now. Hadn't she told him that she would be with him until the end? Wasn't this the end, so goddammit, where was she? She was dead and he was not, and he knew that he should not have felty guilty about it, but he did. He was free now, wasn't he, which meant that she was free, too...
Yet he knew that it was just wishful thinking, something generated by a naive hope inside him that he had apparently failed in stamping out years ago. Had she been alive, her inner demons would not have allowed them the same relationship as before. The passage of time had changed her, like wind carves away on a boulder until its shape is nothing like the original. He asked himself repeatedly: which hurt more, the fact that she was dead, or the fact that she had changed and no longer loved him like she had?
Someone was at the door to the room. Had been there a while.
Spike cracked open an eyes and was met with the sight of Faye, dressed in normal clothing for once, leaning on the doorframe. She wasn't looking at him, but at the VidScreen on the table beside him, but he knew that she had been observing
him. He felt a little of the old Spike return, for the moment.
"If you wanted to admire me, Faye, you shoulda asked me to get up and turn in a circle." She ignored him, moving in the room at his comment. She curled up in the armless chair on the other side of the table, picking a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and lighting one up.
As they sat, he wondered if he should thank her for what she did or not. He still hadn't sorted out whether or not he was really happy with the whole 'being alive' thing, knowing that when he had gone to finish off the ghosts haunting him, he had gone with every intention of not coming back, and certainly not alive. "Life's a bitch and then you die", right? Guess not.
What to do, what to do?
He could still recall that sense of disappointment he felt upon waking in the hospital so strongly that he felt it. She had seen it in his eyes, and had been unnaturally subdued since. He could get why she had been so affected - she had done something incredibly selfless and he had looked disappointed about it when he should have at least thanked her for saving his life, regardless of if he wanted the aforementioned life or not. Coming back to himself, he felt her staring at him, but only because he was staring at her. Their eyes locked together, and he remembered this from before, only they had been much closer. She had confronted him in the hallway, and he had shown her his eyes. He had awoken in the hospital bed and had seen the wet gleam in hers. He knew that she was probably remembering what he had said to her in the hallway, and his thoughts were confirmed when he saw her eyes switching from staring at his right, then his left eye.
[Hitotsu no me de asu o mite
Hitotsu no me de kinou mistumeteru
One side of my eyes see tomorrow
And the other one sees yesterday]
Now her eyes snapped fully onto his, literally 'an eye for an eye', and a small smile perked up the corners of her lips. It was a sweet, honest, relieved kind of smile, and it was very un-Faye like. His mouth opened instantly in question. "What?" The intended gruffness didn't sound as irritated as he had wanted it to.
Faye, still smiling (if not, wider now), replied, "Your eyes have changed." He looked at her, clearly nonplussed. "You told me that one eye sees the past and the other sees the present, the dream and the reality. Your 'past' eye was always so hollow, and your 'present' eye looked haunted because of it. But now, they both look different." She paused, blew some smoke out her nose in thought.
"They look alive."
"I'm not going there to die...."
"You look alive."
"I'm going to find out if I'm really alive."
Well, there was his answer.
He righted himself on the couch. The few moments it took for him to move stretched into hours.
"Why did you love me?"
His feet touched the floor.
"Let's just go away somewhere. Vanish. Go somewhere where there's no one else. Just the two of us."
He stood, leaving the warm hollow he had created.
"It's all a dream."
His shoes made a shuffling noise as he walked.
"You told me to forget the past..."
His hands did not go in his pockets. He did not slouch.
"Is it for the girl?"
"She's dead. There's nothing I can do for her now."
He was standing before her.
"Keep going, just drive past it."
Kneeling. Leaning forward. Long arms coming around her neck and back.
"There once was a tiger striped cat..."
His face moved forward until they were cheek to cheek, his nose in her hair and the hand on the back of her neck stroking softly.
"This cat died a million deaths, revived, and lived a million lives. And he was owned by various people who he didn't really care for. The cat wasn't afraid to die. Then one day the cat became a stray cat, which meant he was free. He met a white female cat and the two of them spent their days together happily. Well, years passed, and the white cat grew weak and died of old age..."
Slowly, her arms wrapped around his chest, one hand touching the mop of fuzzy green hair that she had always teased him for, but secretly wanted to touch. He gave a little sigh, holding her tighter and muttering four little words that she almost didn't
hear.
"The tiger striped cat cried a million times and then he died, too. Except this time, he didn't come back to life."
"I hate that story."
[Doro no kawa ni sukatta jinsei mo warukuwanai
Ichido kiri de owarunara
It's not bad, a life in the muddy river
It life is once]
A/N: Well, I think that about wraps things up. I had wanted to make this into two seperate chapters, the first about Spike freeing himself from his past, the second about him coming to grips with Julia's death. But when I began writing, they seemed so unbalanced without one another, so I put them together into one big peice. The only qualms I have with this is my gross comma abuse early on (I am a glutton for the commas), and the fact that I might seem a but too repetitious at times. And maybe I abused the quotes just a little.... (I'm waaay to critical of myself)
Other than that, I am happy. Even with how the ending went. I think that Spike isn't OOC, he's just not inhibited by his past anymore. I think he could be quite the expressive guy if he wasn't hung up over the syndicate and Julia.
All quotes from the final episode, song lyrics from The Real Folk Blues and See You Space Cowboy, repsectively.
Again, thanks for reading!