Okay guys, like I promised, here it is. Please don't hate me. The last chapter should be out in the next month, but I wanted to get near the end before school started up again. A few notes that accompany this chapter are on my profile page. Here we go…
---16:23:34---
"Please, don't die. Please." She whispered with her hand over his soaked chest. "Please, don't leave me. I can't take this again."
Spike became aware of his being, of the darkness he was engulfed in, and the voice that spoke to him. It wasn't Faye. Or Julia. It was Alyssa.
"You promised me, you wouldn't die. You promised me you'd always be here." Light in one eye—his mechanical eye. He could see red lips speaking, dark curls cascading on each side of her face and wet bands of tears reaching the corner of her mouth and underneath her chin. "You promised!" She screamed and punched his chest, then got up and out view. He heard a monopod's engine and then darkness again.
Spike slowly stirred at first—limbs awakening before his own consciousness. His lids had fused together, pushing down on his eyes like heavy weights every time he tried to open them. His memory caught up with him before he could manage to fully awaken. Julia's red lips, Alyssa's pleads, and his own near-death. He remembered Faye over him, and then nothing. His hand instinctively reached to touch his fake eye—his sudden curse. It recorded the most painful unwanted images, harbored them and summoned them at his weakest moments.
Spike's hands began to wander around the bed which felt softer and warmer than usual. He almost had his eyes fully open when he heard her voice.
"Are you awake now?" a child spoke. It sounded familiar enough, but he knew that it definitely wasn't Ed. "Wake up, sleepy head," the voice told him.
His lids blinked several times. He could almost keep them fully open, but his sight was blurry, disturbed by the light shining from behind him. That didn't make sense. The door to his room was right should have been facing the side of his bed. When he finally managed to focus his view, bright colors suddenly engulfed him. The gray of his room had vanished and been replaced by pink and violet hues and warm browns. He was lying on his side, so he faced the wall that had a wooden bookcase with children's novels and classics. On top of the case was a small space revealing the grainy pink walls and above that a display shelf with decorative plates and frames of family members he did not recognize.
Spike sat up and glanced at the pink sheets covering him and his memory alerted him immediately that the surroundings were familiar, but buried deep within him. He glanced at the framed amateur paintings of flowers and at the stuffed animals sitting on a shelf and another above that lined with perfumes and creams. He stared at the glossy black piano and more photos resting on top of it next to a metronome, and finally at the desk that had a picture of a woman that he almost recognized. She looked so much like Faye.
"A dream," he thought aloud.
"Well of course it is," said young Faye as she stepped out of a door next to the desk. "What else would it be?" She neared him and sat on the bed. "I've wanted to meet you for so long, though I knew I wouldn't get to. But circumstances have changed, haven't they?"
He said nothing, but instead studied the small teenager in her light blue pajamas. She smiled at him with a curious gleam in her eyes while pulling a lock of hair behind her ear.
"You like my room?" she asked. "You liked it the first time you saw it." She stood and walked towards the shelf with the stuffed animals. Smiling, she grabbed the small stuffed duck with the red bow, poked his beak with her small nose and then sat back down. "It's funny how you remember details like this, don't you think?" She waved the duck at him as if he ought to recognize it. "Do you know that everything started changing slowly when you saw that video? A part of you loved her then, but it was buried deep within and underneath all your other troubles that you didn't notice it."
Spike was growing lightheaded from all her talking and feeling somewhat nauseous, he wanted to wake up.
"And once you were left with nothing, it finally had a chance to surface."
"Why am I here?" he asked, wanting to end the dream before he threw up all over himself.
"There's a lot about Faye you don't understand. You're afraid you're going to kill her like you killed Julia. It haunts you, and you can't save her that way," she responded.
He couldn't listen to her anymore; the urge of the nausea overcame him. The pink walls and their child ornaments spun all around him.
"The bathroom, where is it?" he asked in a hoarse tone. Young Faye pointed at the door where she had come from, and when he started heading towards it, she jumped up and yelped.
"No, don't go in there!" she said as she dropped the fake duck on the mauve carpet.
"I need to use the bathroom so just leave me alone, okay?" He reached for the doorknob.
"No, you don't understand! You need to wake up! Wake up, Spike!" She kept shouting, but he opened the door regardless and the moment he did her shouts stopped. The bathroom was a dark room instead where both his parents were holding hands with a little girl he also knew. She was smiling and swinging their hands back and forth.
"Alyssa?" Spike said, and both his parents disappeared and she ran. He chased her through the darkness until it formed into a street. Shots rang around him so he ducked down and when he opened his eyes again, he was under a car and his hands were those of a small child and so was his body. Spike glanced at his surroundings, his mind piecing together the scene taking place before. He was reliving the shot that killed his father, but this time Alyssa was in the middle of the street with her hands over her ears, crying and screaming for them to stop. Then his mother ran towards him and was shot just like in his memory, but as she fell down her light brown hair brightened to blonde, and her face elongated, lips reddened. When she hit the ground she had completely metamorphosed into Julia.
"Stop it!" he heard Alyssa scream, and Spike saw himself as an adult with a gun aimed at Julia's head. This second Julia was kneeled before him with eyes closed.
"Stop it!" Spike screamed at his older self, and then shut his eyes wanting to wake up, wanting for the confusion to end. When he opened them again he was the adult holding the gun to what was now Faye's forehead. He looked towards the car and instead of himself. He saw younger Faye glancing at the dead Julia and then at him, crying.
Spike stared at Faye and then shut his eyes tight as he felt his finger pull the trigger against his will.
"Wake up!" he screamed.
"Spike!" Faye yelled and he opened his eyes. She was above him staring with disconcerted eyes. He glanced all around—the metal walls, his hard bed, the open door to his room on the Bebop.
"I woke up," he whispered. He sat up suddenly and he glanced at his watch. They had less than twelve hours left.
"You've been out for five hours or so," Faye told him and his eyes widened.
"Jesus Christ!" He pulled the covers off him and searched for his shirt and shoes.
"Spike!" she called to him, but he wasn't listening. "Spike!" She cupped his face forcefully with her hands. "Stop it. You nearly had a heart attack. We had to give you a sedative."
"Ed, did she find…" Spike stared at her light pink lips afraid to glance into her eyes.
"She did her best," she let go of his face and scoffed. "So-called genius."
"We'll try something else!" he yelled, exasperated by her carefree attitude.
"It's over. Don't you get it? She won. There's nothing we can do anymore." Her gaze focused on the dusty ground while his focused on the open door.
"Do you have a cigarette?" he asked. She fumbled around her shirt for moment looking a little lost as if she didn't really know what she was searching for. Then she stopped and bent down towards her white boots and pulled out a pack. He was slightly disgusted at the fact she kept her cigarettes in her shoes, but shrugged it off. He needed the nicotine more than he cared about where they had been.
Spike reached for his lighter sitting on the metal table next to his bed. He lit his cigarette and passed the lighter to her. She sat on his bed and the both of them silently consuming the heavy puffs of nicotine. It was something to do. He wasn't thinking anything in particular then, but just merely sitting in the dark next to her awaiting some grand revelation from above. There was a movie like that once about some centuries-old martyr. A woman. The scene was in this dark dungeon room and she was just sitting there with her head slumped and her bowl haircut hiding under a veil they had made her wear because she couldn't wear pants or something like that.
Then a brilliant light appeared and saved her. Is that how it went? It was something odd like that. He only thought of the movie because he needed a miracle. Not that he had even been the religious kind, but a miracle would save their lives. At least a mental miracle, a realization that would allow him to comprehend how to use the information he had received from Nathan. There had to be a reason for that.
"It's stupid," Faye said—she had finished her cigarette. "It's stupid to blame ourselves, I mean. It's stupid for me to blame you. It doesn't do anything anymore. Look at you." She shook her head with a look of pity.
"Fuck you," he said. She narrowed her eyes at him. "You act like I wanted this. That's fine, Faye. I don't give a shit what you think. Yeah, I was stupid and did stupid things, and probably the stupidest I've ever done was…" He faced her, but stopped. He was only an inch away from her. His body had turned, leaning toward hers. Her warm breath tingled on his skin and he wanted to pull back, but her eyes had completely focused on him. She would not release him from her stare.
"Finish it. The stupidest thing you've ever done is what?" Faye asked. "Say it."
"To come back to you," he hesitated—scared of the words about to leave him. "To want to be with you." Her stare remained inert, but tears dampened her eyelids. She closed her eyes letting them fall and leaned forward. Their lips connected and he swallowed her breath into his being. His hand reached towards her face, aching to touch her skin, but her own hand grabbed his the moment he made contact with her cheek. She moved away from him and stood up leaving him startled and disoriented.
"That's what I thought," she whispered and then just before she exited the room she added, "I can't possibly do this after all." She smiled—a tight-lipped half-hearted smile. Her hand grazed the side of his cheek and she shook her head sadly at him. She left him alone in his room after that; the second time she had done so in the last twenty-four hours. It was so sardonic and a little funny that he thought about laughing, but he didn't have the energy.
"Jesus Christ," he said to the darkness while pressing his hands hard against his face.
He could sit for the remaining ten hours to try and concoct some kind of miraculous way to save them all, but one big problem still lingered. He knew nothing about anything anymore. Spike Spiegel had been burned, scratched, driven to insanity, and rejected all the last forty-eight hours and truthfully, he had run out of resources before the countdown even started. Alyssa was already beyond insane and Faye didn't even hate him. She pitied him.
Did he believe in God? Could he pray the damn city to salvation like Father Giovanni would try? No, not at all. In fact, why would God listen to him, the very man that committed the murder that would ripple out in the stream of his god-forsaken life to pure genocide? No, he had never understood faith. He had never understood how someone could base their entire structure of life on something they could not see. It scared the piss out of him.
So what could he do now?
Most people would usually never expect it out of him, but whenever he had a situation which he couldn't find himself way out of or even when he lacked any direction he would go straight to him. He would enter his hut to find the sand drooling and slipping from his fingers onto the ground. The little grains would make ripples that would somehow reveal to this old shaman what would happen next in Spike's life, and right now that was exactly what he needed. He needed to know how this story would end.
Spike never claimed fortune-telling to be a science, but for some reason whenever Spike told people that he believed in such a thing they'd burst out in laughter. They would mutter on about how it was absolutely ridiculous and unlike him to spout about fate and the universe. It didn't matter to him. The shaman had never failed him once. He said he would fall in love with the most prohibited of pleasures and he did. He said that it would be his greatest tragedy and it was.
He had only failed at one prediction. Jet told Spike about it the second week or so that he came back.
"He said your star would fall, but here you are." Jet said after taking a drag of his cigarette. His black eyes fell cautiously on Spike with that skeptic stare that wondered still if Spike was merely a ghost or real.
"Maybe it did fall." Spike responded somberly. Jet shifted uncomfortably in his seat and shook his head.
"I don't know why I believed in the crackpot even for a second."
Everyone is entitled to one mistake in their lives. So okay, predicting someone's death and then that failing to happen would fall into the major blunder of his career category, but right now his answer would be better than nothing.
When he entered the hut, he didn't exactly expect Laughing Bull to be shocked at his presence. However, the old shaman merely glanced up at him and then down at his dripping sand again. There was not a remote sign of disappointment at least. One of his predictions had been completely off the mark after all.
"Wasn't my star supposed to fall?" Not that Spike wanted to rub it in, but at least some kind of explanation would do.
"The devil resurrected you," he paused, "you don't have much time."
"That's why I'm here," Spike said, sitting down across from him.
"You should know how it ends. It's happened before. The woman will die." His voice was coarser and deeper than usual.
"I need to save her," Spike said.
"The lives of people do not rely on you. Only she can save them now. Only she can choose."
"I can't lose her too," Spike said and Laughing Bull looked up from his sand and straight into Spike's right eye.
"You take women too lightly. You can't lose something that isn't yours. This woman isn't your redemption. She is your second chance at life. Someone must die in order for another life to begin. It is a cycle. The Devil resurrected you and someone must die in your place."
"Then the Devil will have to take my place instead." The old man closed his fist causing the remaining sand in his hand to burst from the sides of his tight palm and break the ripples on the ground.
Spike didn't wait to see if Laughing Bull had anything left to say. He had heard enough. The old shaman had been wrong about his death and he could be wrong about Faye's. Spike would make sure he was wrong about Faye's.
On the way back to the Bebop, he sifted through his memories and focused on Faye. It was mostly small details that had happened over the time he'd known her—memories that bobbed to the top of his mind that he never even thought he had actually paid attention to. There was that time when they chased the terrorist activist crazies through the gate. Spike and Faye's monopods made it out just in time, but she freaked out after the gate closed. She wrapped her arms around her head, afraid of the phantom dimension versions of the bombs heading for Ganymede.
"Didn't you learn that in high school?" Jet smirked and gave her the special physics lesson. Is that what her life was like? Was she constantly ducking from ghosts from another time, another place? She was born from a different world, and that's why she didn't know the things that were common knowledge to everyone else in the 21st century. Faye just didn't know. Her life as a child was under that perfect blue sky with its moon, which books say could sometimes be seen shining during the day like a white ghost. Spike couldn't imagine that moon. He couldn't imagine the earth full of people, of cities, of planes and cars. It didn't make sense. Earth had always been this desert, this spherical Atlantis that disappointed its visitors with its rusted ruins. An earth without constant rock showers. An earth full of laughter.
Faye was one of those portraits in history books coming to life. The pictures from the holocaust, from the wars and the end of the world, coming to life right then. She was one of those smiling kids in the photos of the memorials for the Gate Incident—a ghost that had outlived her entire generation.
What nearly killed her back then? He never asked. She had been resurrected to be punished just like him.
If it hadn't been because his comm. beeped, Spike would have gone straight past the bay and out of the city. He flinched when he heard the electronic ping from his speakers, thinking that it would be Jet angry as all hell, wondering where in the hell Spike had gone off to at a time like this. Time was the problem, Spike thought right before clicking to answer the call.
"Spike? Finally," muttered the old doctor on the screen. He rubbed his white moustache and gave a small grunt. "Jet didn't know where the hell you went—his words exactly."
"What is it?" Had Nathan died, Spike wondered.
"Nathan regained consciousness just a bit ago and insisted that I relay a message to you."
"Yeah?" So he didn't die. "I have a message for him too: his information was worth shit." Spike said, but Doc shook his head.
"It's urgent. He said something about giving a number to some woman, Faye, some other woman's comm. number. I don't know. He might have been delirious, said he had some bad feeling about it, didn't know what he was thinking and so on. You know, I don't do this messenger thing. This is going to cost extra."
Spike had stopped listening after the first sentence, immediately putting the information together in his mind. Nathan had given Faye a contact number—Alyssa's number. His heart was pounding. Spike shut it off as Doc began to rant again. He was at the bay already. He landed at the Bebop and saw her ship still there, so she hadn't done anything reckless yet. However, that still didn't appease him. When he went inside, he met with an exasperated and infuriated Jet in the common room.
"Where the fuck did you go? Who the hell do you think you are? We are killing ourselves over here trying to figure your shit out and you leave?" He was shouting. The first time Spike had ever heard Jet shout like he would be willing to kill at this point.
"I know, Jet, but we have a bigger problem," Spike replied glancing around him.
"The fuck? A bigger problem!" Jet muttered sarcastically.
"Jet, where's Faye?" Jet shook his head. Something in Spike's voice made his anger to relent to the question.
"You didn't see her outside? What's the problem anyway?" Jet asked.
"No, I didn't. Faye has Alyssa's comm. number—wait, why would she be outside?" Spike's head had begun spinning.
"I talked to her some time ago. She said she needed some fresh air and was going to go smoke on the deck," Jet's speech slowed down to a near-stop, "outside. She hasn't come back in. You don't think she would…"
Take Alyssa on by herself, Spike finished the sentence in his mind. He suddenly understood the gut feeling churning in his stomach. He shouted her name several times and received no answer. Jet used the intercom of the ship for once and called for her, while Spike tried her comm., but she had left it in her ship. Spike ran to the bridge and asked Ed to find her using the thing for tracking the bombs. Ed became immediately gleeful with the prospect of becoming useful again.
"We need to split up. She couldn't have gotten that far. She must still be somewhere on the Southside," Spike said.
"Shouldn't we just wait for Ed?" Jet asked, but Spike shook his head.
"Ed, call us when you find her," Spike added before heading toward the hangar with Jet following behind, quickly stopping by the Hammerhead to grab his nearest gun.
"I'll take west end, you take east," Jet said and Spike nodded. They left on foot, because it would be easier to find her through the alleys and small crowds that had formed despite the terror alert. It would be easy to miss Faye underneath the canvas roofs and the tightly packed buildings.
He usually had so much adrenaline. Spike was usually so durable, so strong. He had always relied on his body, on physical stamina for everything. Why was it failing him now? His shins were burning, but the more they burned, the more he ran. He dashed down alley ways with comm. in hand, stopped a couple of women that looked nothing like her even, but he didn't stop once. His Achilles tendons ached now, but his heart was beating fast and his body barely sweating. The pain didn't mean anything. He could endure this until he found her.
"Gotcha!" Ed's voice boomed through the comm.'s frequency. "Faye-faye's ping is on the west side of the city. Ooop, weird signal! Weird signal!"
"Ed, where?" Spike yelled back.
"Getting map! 60th and Huang road." Spike glanced around him. He was on sixtieth, and Huang was a couple of blocks away. He ran and when he reached the wide intersection, a few cars whizzed by, but there was barely anyone around. He examined the two banks, and the corporate building. He needed to think of something fast. Looking up toward the sky, he realized where she might be. He hurried past the sign that read Alba High Park. The city park was located on the roof of the corporate building, some eighteen floors up.
"Are you guys closing the park?" A young couple asked the front desk as Spike passed it towards the elevator.
"No, we're operating under our normal schedule," answered the security guard.
"Some girl was up there telling us that it was closing. I swear, paranoid freak."
As soon he entered the elevator, he had to crouch down and wrap his arms around his legs. Spike could hardly breathe and his heart was beating out of control. The elevator creaked and groaned as he floated up above, but by the third floor, he was already begging his chest not to have another panic attack. He had never felt so weak in his life than he had in the last two days. Everything had come at him at once, not letting him pause to catch his breath, his thoughts or his emotions. Spike hadn't the time to keep everything well-monitored and in control. Not only that, but every time the walls of the elevator creaked they seemed to tremble and grow a bit closer. How long had he been in there? He glanced up at the digital floor marker which passed the number 12, then 13. He had about twenty stories left and most likely not enough breath.
It had been years since his pseudo-claustrophobia acted up. When his parents died, he found that he couldn't be in any enclosed spaces or surrounded by too many people or his heart would start knocking his ribs, which in turn pushed down so hard as if to strangle it. At some point, they had thought he was asthmatic, but they only began to understand what was really happening after he suffered from a stomach ulcer due to the inhaler medicine they forced him to take. That's when they learned about his recurring nightmare.
The nightmare started out in his old childhood home. When he was five, he discovered a gun in a secret compartment under the large cedar bookcase in his father's study. As his small hand reached to touch the glossy pistol, he heard his mother scream behind him. His father rushed in as she pulled the gun box away from Spike. She disregarded Spike and turned to his father hysterical. They began screaming at each other. It was all so loud that he couldn't make out the words. He just wanted it to stop. He closed his eyes and then opened them again, and he was at the funeral. His parent's joint casket was open and they were staring at him. His mother began to reach with her hand toward him, but the door shut close on her. He flinched and suddenly felt the warmth of his breath hitting his face. He opened his eyes and he was in the casket with his parents and when he screamed and reached up to get out, it snapped shut.
As the elevator reached the 20th floor, Spike Spiegel stood up. He forced his legs to sustain him as he ascended, because whatever was awaiting him, he needed his full strength to survive it. Able to discern his claustrophobia from his horrible precognitive feeling, he took a deep breath and pulled out his gun.
The park wasn't all that large, but it had a good portion of oaks, bushes and thick green grass with three paved paths with benches along the sides that connected to a fountain at the center. Spike rushed through the trees toward that fountain. There were no people to interfere as far as he could tell, and he figured the perfect place to meet would be there.
Spike halted in his steps when he heard a voice. He had nearly reached the center, but he quickly dashed behind a tree to try and remain unseen.
"Did you bring it?" Alyssa asked. She was standing in front of the fountain on the right side and Faye directly across from her.
"Of course I did," Faye answered with a smirk. She pulled out the small silver cross from underneath her t-shirt.
"Give it back," Alyssa uttered the moment she saw it, but then retracted her words as she narrowed her eyes, "What do you want?" Her face was pale and her eyes opaque, lids swollen.
"I want you to take it out." Faye clasped the cross tightly in her hand.
"I can't do that. You know that." Alyssa's hand fumbled with the back of her shirt.
"You put it in me," Faye said in a low tone, "and I want you to take it back out. I have nothing to do with you!"
"Just give it to me." Alyssa's brow furrowed and Spike saw that her muscles tensed, ready to dash forward, while her hand behind her back reached under her shirt near the top seam of the pants. Spike's instinct was to trap her there, but a hand on his shoulder stopped him. He turned around and saw Julia staring gravely at him. He took a deep breath to conceal the shock in him. He'd grown tired of feeling her. He wished it could at least go back to the numbness of before.
"Wait," Julia said. At that instant, Alyssa sprang forward with gun in hand. Faye saw it coming, pulled out her Glock, and kicked Alyssa's gun from her hand.
"Don't fucking play with me." Faye aimed the gun at Alyssa's head. Alyssa took a deep breath and few steps back, occasionally throwing a glance at the gun that was on the grass and too far out of her reach.
"You're going to kill me?" Alyssa asked in a whisper. Faye cocked her head to the side and smirked.
"Don't tell me, you're scared of dying." Faye lowered the gun to Alyssa's chest. Alyssa shivered, taking in another deep breath. "You are, aren't you? That's pathetic."
"Did you come out of that rusted ship to look around at all the people who are going to die in your stead? Spike is still having trouble making a decision, isn't he? I'm glad you're worth to him more than you look." Alyssa had regained total composure. Spike didn't understand it—women. They had the ability to suddenly change their emotions at will.
"You pretentious bitch," Faye responded just as calmly. "You're just like him. You think this is all about you. Just like he thinks this is all about him. You put the choice in my hands, Alyssa." Faye grabbed the gun with both her hands. "Who says I won't do it? Who says I won't take you with me first?"
Spike's mind sounded an alarm, but Julia's grip on his shoulder tightened.
"Listen," she told him.
Faye stepped closer with the gun and Alyssa's fear returned to her eyes, glancing more rapidly at the gun lying on the ground.
"See, there's the difference between you and me." Faye headed towards Alyssa's gun, her own barrel still pointed at Alyssa's chest. She squat down and picked the gun up. Faye walked back with both aimed at Alyssa. Faye smiled and then she turned one on herself.
"What are you doing?" Alyssa muttered with her hand extended toward Faye.
"Shall we?" Faye cocked her head to the side.
"Faye!" Spike couldn't hold it any longer and pushed Julia's hand away and ran in front of Alyssa. "Faye, don't do this." He heard Alyssa stammer something inaudible behind him.
"What the fuck are you doing here?" Faye's hand started to tremble.
"Faye, you can't die. I won't let you."
"You won't let me!" Faye yelled. Her emerald eyes widened and her brows creased with rage. She didn't have the stare of woman about to kill herself. Not like those sad blue eyes of Julia, empty and sullen, but instead full of emotion, determined to live. "Fuck you, Spike!" Tears menaced to push forward. "Who do you think you are? I'm not Julia. I won't let you condemn my life. If I'm going to die, it's my fucking choice. Isn't this what you would do? Wouldn't you choose to die? But unlike you, I'm going to make sure no cryogenics or anything will bring me back to life."
"Faye." Spike neared with arms slightly raised.
"Don't come near me!" She shook the second gun at him.
"Faye, don't do this just to get back at me. Don't throw you life away just to get back at me," Spike pleaded. A loud sob left Faye's lips as the tears came unabashed. She threw the gun she aimed at him behind her, and grabbed her Glock with both hands.
"I can't," Faye began, but stopped and looked away from him.
"Faye," he whispered. "It's not worth it." Spike was scared. He had never been so scared in his life. His hands were now visibly trembling.
"Faye?" Spike heard Jet's voice and turned his head to the side to get a glimpse at him. He was holding his own gun at Alyssa's back.
"Jet," Faye sobbed and shook her head. She took a deep breath and glared at Spike. Her eyes were speaking to him again. They were telling him about her life, her past, the awakening in a world not her own. They were telling him about them, about that time he stared so deeply into her that she fell apart. They were saying, "One eye sees the past, that distant world under the bright full moon, and the other sees the future, this painful world we're living in."
His eyes widened as he noticed her arm muscles tensing. He leapt forward and a single shot echoed throughout the park. A mass of small mottled birds nestled in the trees emerged like fast arrows and headed east toward the sun.