--

Three Tequila, Floor

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They rolled into a heap at the far wall. "Jet!" Faye screamed, her mouth stalling on the first consonant. "Jet! Where is he? We have to get Jet!"

"What's he got that I don't?" Spike demanded unreasonably.

"Sobriety!" she shrieked. The lights of the common room fliskered as Ed wrenched the ship straight upwards.

"Shit!" Spike said again.

"Shit! What do we do?"

"We have to stop her! She's drunk and flying the ship…"

"How? How can she fly it? Jet has… you know… that thing… so people can't steal it…"

"Keys," Spike finished for her. He was frustrated. He couldn't seem to concentrate on anything, and whereas this had made things fun before it wasn't doing much for him now. They both struggled to their feet together. The ship lurched back and forth. He wondered what the altitude was… whatever it was, it sure was growing fast. He could feel the accelerating drag of gravity on his body, and he knew that this wasn't just an affect of tequila.

He could feel his brain trying to work, but the neurons or relays or whatever the hell it was that normally made him function were currently out to lunch.

"She's hacking in," Faye said. "Where is she? Where's Tomato? We have to stop her. Shit. We have to stop her. Ouch!"

"Sorry," he said. He'd just slammed her into the wall as the ship jerked to the side. He heard glass break. Alarms were going off. Lights were blinking. Momentum was all over the place, and it wasn't just in their heads anymore.

"Where's Tomato?" Faye asked.

"Don't know… don't… wait…"

Faye broke away from him and strode off. "Ed!" she shouted. "Ed! We've got a treat for you," she said in a singsong voice. "Something nummy!"

"Treat for Ed?"

"Yes! A great treat!" Faye told her.

"Like the green bottle-bottle?" Ed said deliriously.

"Ed?" Spike said. "Ed… there's more back on the ground. Ed… there's good stuff back there… Ed… come on, Ed, just take us down. Slowly," he added.

"Shit! Why'd we get so drunk!" Faye shouted, clinging onto the doorway for her life. He grabbed onto her arm for support.

"It was your idea!"

"Was not!"

"Was too!"

"Was… what were we talking about?"

The ship lurched again. "We're going to die," Spike said with a smile. It was true – he wasn't afraid.

"There!" Faye cried, pointing at the stairs. Spike looked. Ed was lying across the stairs backward, bracing herself against the railings with her legs, her mouth open with silent laughter (this was, he thought, the best joke ever in her book even when she was sober), and in her hands she had what looked like agame controller.

He let go of Faye. It was no use trying to stand. The lurching ship and the fact that he was so drunk it would have felt like the ship was lurching anyway – these were two big counts against walking. He crawled – or at times because of the angle the ship was flying, he climbed – across the floor towards the stairs.

"Edward's got your Bebop, ooh la la…"

"Yes Ed. Good for you. Give me that thing," he said, pulling himself up the first few stairs.

"Wanna do the loop-de-loop?"

"No!"

He was close enough to grab onto her arm. Ed cried out in surprise when he tried to wrench the controller away. "Mine! Get your own!"

"C'mere you little… crazy… drunk…"

"Ed wants to PLAY!"

They struggled. Gravity kept changing direction. She bit him but he didn't even notice until a second later – that was one advantage of being drunk while you wrestled with Ed. Finally he knocked the controller out of her hand – he heard it break against something – and grabbed onto the railing, bracing them both while the ship reeled and closing his eyes tightly.

The ship dropped so fast that their bodies hovered in the air for almost ten seconds, but then – suddenly – the rate of descent evened out. The ship steadied. For Spike the room kept spinning, but at least his body was staying in more or less the right place.

Faye stumbled back into the room a few minutes later. "Auto-pilot," she mumbled, grabbing onto the wall. "Landing sequence engaged. Pleash remain seeded nntil yership cmstoo full stop."

Time passed – and they jarred to a halt.

Spike got up and walked down the stairs.

"Edward!" Faye shouted.

Ed appeared from behind him and he stopped in his tracks to watch her as she searched for the pieces of her controller. She couldn't walk straight. She didn't usually walk straight and Spike in his drunken state was not a very good judge of straight, but Ed was definitely not focusing on the direction her feet were taking her. He felt the overwhelming pressure of a foreign feeling: guilt.

"What's that nasty-gross stuff? Ed tried it. Ed didn't like it. Ed tried some more."

"You idiot!" Spike shouted at her. "You shouldn't have touched that stuff!"

"It made Spike and Faye-Faye so happy!" she protested. "Ed wanted to be happy too!"

"That's my girl," said Faye, wiping her forehead and collapsing onto the couch.

Spike thought about trying to put together a lecture, but his mind was very muddled, and anyway they weren't about to die anymore. Landing had been achieved.

--

"Attagirl," Faye said out of her drunken haze. She was supporting Ed with one hand, patting her back with the other. Ed was losing her lunch over the side of the Bebop's runway onto the desert floor below. They were parked at a tilt, but as the ship was at a full halt and not going anywhere, neither Faye nor Spike was complaining, and Ed seemed to be preoccupied.

"Oooh," Ed said between dry-heaves, "That stuff was bad."

"Yes. Very bad. Very very very bad stuff," Faye agreed. She still wasn't even close to sober, and she was starting to feel a little bit queasy too. But she was relieved that the kid was getting it out of her system. Her brain was waking up enough to know that a vast amount of tequila inside a thirteen-year-old was bad for a lot of reasons, and it was good to know that Ed was fully conscious.

Finally Ed's stomach seemed to quit. Faye got her a glass of water. Ed gargled it musically. By now Ed was by far the most sober out of the three of them. "Ed, where did Jet go?" Faye asked.

"Jet-person went bye-bye. Said he needed to walk," Ed said.

"I wonder if he'll find his way home," Faye muttered. "It's not where he left it."

Faye was struggling for sobriety. She had never wanted to be sober so much in her life. What if they had crashed? What if they had burnt up in the atmosphere? What if they had lost control and went careening through space until the ends of time? These were sobering thoughts for her conscious mind, if not her bloodstream. And Ed was just about turning inside out. No one, Faye reflected, ever forgot their first experience with tequila. No one.

Well, of course there was a lot you forgot, but the general feeling afterward sure stayed with you.

For a while she just sat with Ed by the edge of the Bebop's platform, still dizzy. Ed fell asleep so fast she actually fell backward, but at least it was a natural sleep. She snored loudly. Faye watched her sleep for a minute, drunkenly fascinated by the even unmarkedness of the young girl's skin. Had she ever been so young herself? Her mind was wandering...

Eventually Spike came out with a blanket. He didn't say anything, just wrapped it around Ed, picked her up (with an unsteady sidestep) and brought her back inside. He came close to dropping her and ramming her head into the wall a few times, but he made it eventually. Faye followed him. He laid the kid on the sofa, where she stretched out and snored loudly some more.

"I think she got it all out of her," Faye said. She could tell her words were still slurred. The drink hadn't worn off yet. Maybe it never would. Maybe she'd be drunk for the rest of her life.

I almost was drunk for the rest of my life, she thought.

They put away the glasses and the extra limes, and they threw the bottle from the deck of the Bebop out into the empty desert night. Still it wasn't wearing off. Whatever that stuff was, it was worth the money. But the drunkenness was stale now, no longer exciting.

All of a sudden she felt so sleepy. Sleep was the answer. If she could just settle back here… okay, she was on the deck of the ship and outside, but even so… good a place as any… just shut her eyes…

She blinked them open again when something touched her thigh. It was Spike's shoe. She looked up at him from the spot on the deck where she had curled up and he looked down at her.

"That was close," he said.

"Yeah."

"We probably shouldn't do that again."

"What – get drunk, or get Ed drunk?"

"I don't know. You still drunk?"

"Yes. Very," she said.Why even bother to lie?

"Me too."

"Go sleep it off, then," she said.

"You first."

"I'm trying," she mumbled blearily, closing her eyes to him and rolling over. The metal floor didn't have a lot of give, but it was nice and cool and at least when she closed her eyes it stayed in one place. If only she didn't have to think anymore.

Suddenly she felt his breath on her stomach, and two long arms crept underneath her body. "Whaddaryoudoing," she muttered half-heartedly.

"Your turn," he said, staggering to his feet unevenly.

She felt the floor fall away from her by degrees. Faye woke up a bit more when he came close to dropping her. "Hey," she protested. "Hey! I'm close enough to losing my lunch as it is!" Still, she made no motion to get away from him. "Put me down, Spike."

He didn't speak. He was too busy concentrating on staying upright and keeping his hold on the scrawny woman in his arms. One arm looped under her white thighs, their muscles now lax with exhaustion, and the other arm ran under her back. He grasped his hands together in front of her to make sure his grip didn't slip. He wasn't sure what had put the idea in his head, but now that he had started it he was going to carry it through. He noticed when she leaned her head against his chest after a minute and closed her eyes, and one of her hands crept up to the top of his shoulder and rested there. For some reason it pleased him.

He staggered unevenly into the ship, made his way to her room, kicked her door open, stumbled in and deposited her on her bunk. She made a sound and grabbed for her pillow, snuggling into it with a smile. He watched her for a moment before he actually lost his balance and fell on top of her.

"Whaddaryou up to now?" she slurred blearily.

"Fell," he managed to say with effort. His torso was lying on top of her pelvis. He dragged himself over her and after a minute he had managed to find a comfortable position lying next to her, and by that point he had decided that it was time to stop moving once and for all. Except that it was too hot in there for sleep. Aggravated, he ripped off his shirt and threw it away somewhere off to the side. Then he lay on his back, on her bed, and his eyes closed on their own.

Nearly asleep herself, she turned on her side and nuzzled into the crook of his arm, throwing a lax leg across his body and resting the palm of her hand on his chest.

--

Spike woke up. He knew right away and without a shred of doubt that he was going to vomit. It was not a question of if, it was a question of when.

He didn't even remember what part of the ship he was in. The ceiling didn't really look familiar.

It took him a minute to become aware of exactly where he was, but his realizations went in this order: All parts of Spike intact? Check. Pants? Check. Shirt?

Shirt?

Shirt tardy. Make a note.

But wait, there was something on his chest. A hand. Quite possibly someone else's hand.

He looked down.

Yes, that would be someone else's hand. And someone else's leg thrown over him, too. And someone else's head on his shoulder.

One look down at the purple hair yellow shorts and it didn't take him long to figure out whose.

With the kind of slowness used by someone expecting a land mine, his gaze moved to her face. It was Faye all right. Her eyes were closed in deep sleep but her mouth was slightly open. So was her top. The button was undone. She was lying on her side with half of her limbs draped over him, and her body was pressed up against him. He slowly became aware that the warm pressure on the side of his ribcage was the warm pressure of her breasts.

Gingerly he took her flacid arm and moved it off of him. He slipped out from under her legand managed to climb over her and off of the bed one inch at a time, careful not to wake her up. This was a point in time in which he was afraid he'd have absolutely nothing to say. She made a little sound like a moan in her sleep when he moved away and she flopped carelessly onto her back.

He stood up straight and looked down at her. He tried avoiding it, but he couldn't not look – there were her breasts, liberated from the little yellow top, resting peacefully on her tiny frame, having slid slightly outward to her sides.(All of a sudden the thought that they had been in contact with his bare skin only moments ago preyed at his mind.) The dark straps of her suspenders, undone and haphazardly bunched on her tummy, contrasted strongly with her creamy white skin. Her shorts were still on, but the opening at the front gaped, exposing the skin very low on her belly.

For a minute Spike was transfixed. No force on the planet could have moved him. He kept thinking: Maybe I could lie back down…

But a wave of nausea interrupted his thoughts, and before he knew it he was running out the door and down the hall to the toilet. After a few minutes of emptying out his stomach, all the traces of arousal were completely gone from his system too.

--

Faye's first thought, like Spike's, was that she was going to throw up, only she had nothing to distract her and keep her from running down the hall to the toilet as soon as she had thrown a robe around herself. She couldn't say how long she crouched there in the bathroom, emptying all her offerings at the altar of the porcelain god, but eventually she made her way back to her room again, determined to go back to sleep and not wake up until the middle of the afternoon - although never was also an option. And then she noticed Spike's shirt on the floor.

She stared at it. Shit. Shit. Shit. She tried to remember what had happened, but it was all a haze. Something about the Bebop having a wild ride, something about a lap dance. Quite possibly a polka had been involved. Something about Spike.

What had they done? Had they done anything? How drunk do you have to be to... how drunk were we?...

Shit, she was too tired to deal with this. Faye threw herself on the bed and went back to sleep.

--

She woke up in the afternoon as planned, grateful to be alone. The room had an ungodly brightness to it.

She sat up carefully, trying not to jostle her stomach or her brain, which seemed to be sloshing around inside her skull. "I hate tequila," she said to herself.

Carefully, carefully, she rose to her feet. Now that soberness had taken over again the room made so much more sense. It was dim, stinky and dirty. Spike's shirt was still splayed out on the floor. Her stomach turned over. She once again tried to remember what had happened, but all she could recall were tiny snatches of scenes that didn't make any sense. However she did remember the feeling of Spike's naked chest under her hand, and this made her want to retch again.

What did we do? What did we do? Did we use protection? Shit!

She would have given all of her life savings to never have come in contact with tequila at all. Not that she had any savings, just a lot of debts. She would have doubled her debts if last night could just have not happened. Her mouth had the taste of melted plastic and sewage, her head ached like it was cleaving, and her entire body felt like scum on the underside of a faucet. Sticky. Stinky. Bad.

She was thristy. She threw a clean shirt on, lurched her body around and wandered into the kitchen to get a sip of water, and there she discovered Jet.

He was standing very still, looking straight at her, and the vein in his forehead gave her the feeling that nothing good was going to be said.

"What… in the hell… happened?" he demanded, through gritted teeth.

"Hmm?"

"Do you know how long it took me to find this ship? DO YOU?"

"Don't talk so loud," she mumbled. She couldn't find a glass, so she ducked her head into the sink and drank straight from the faucet.

"Aren't you going to tell me anything?" he demanded through gritted teeth.

"We… uh… we made a run for it," she lied, having come up for air. "Thugs were trying to steal the ship."

He stared at her evenly. He obviously wasn't buying it.

"Spike!" he yelled. Faye had an instinct to run and hide, but her pride kept her in place, along with the grossness she needed to wash out of her mouth. Soon enough Spike was in the kitchen also, looking as bad as she felt.

"Yo," he said drowsily.

"Spike! What in the hell did you guys do last night?" Jet seethed.

Funny, I was just asking myself the same thing...

"I try to come home this morning and I can't even find my own goddamn ship! I had to call the police and have them track it down! Did you know that you're fifty miles from TJ?"

"Nope," Spike said.

Jet looked ready for murder. "What happened here?"

Spike and Faye didn't even glance at each other. Spike shrugged. "I don't know, ask Ed."

Faye shot a glance at him. That wasn't fair!

"She broke into my liquor stash," Spike said. "I left it out by accident."

"We left it out," Faye mumbled.

"Um… right. Yeah. Accident." He stretched and yawned, pretending to be oblivious to Jet's glare. "Do we have any painkillers?" he asked.

Jet staggered into the living room, livid. He sat down on the chair slowly. He pulled a stocking off of the back of the chair and threw it aside with disgust. "Both of you," he said. "Get off my ship."

"Hey, we said it was an accident…"

"OUT! NOW!"

--

They were sitting in the shade underneath the ship, smoking. Jet didn't seem to care as long as they were somewhere where he couldn't see them. Both were wearing very dark shades.

"Um, Spike?" Faye said softly, breaking the silence.

He grunted.

"Do you remember anything from last night?"

He looked down at her without moving his head, his gaze hidden by the sunglasses. She definitely wasn't looking anywhere near him. It was hard to tell with his sunglasses on, but he thought she might be blushing.

"Not a whole lot," he confessed. Of course he remembered a lot from the morning. There were certain images from that morning that he wouldn't forget, and he would keep remembering them whether or not he wanted to, probably any time he was by himself or in the shower, but he wasn't about to tell her this.

She was not relieved. "You don't think we… um... did anything, do you?"

"I think we did a lot of things."

"No, I mean did we do anything... together." The flush now covered her entire body.

"I think I would remember that," he said with certainty. "Anyways, I… you know…woke up with my pants on," he added, feeling a weird heat rise to his face. It was strange, talking with her like this.

"Right. Of course we didn't. I would never… with you," she commented coldly, the relief obvious in her voice.

"Likewise, I'm sure," he said.

A minute of silence passed. "So… um," she said. "Do you… by any chance… remember who won?"

It took him a minute to figure out what she was talking about. "No clue," he answered finally.

"I can't even remember what the stakes were," she said.

"Me neither."

"And I never forget what the stakes are."

"Yeah."

Silence again.

"Rematch?" he said.

--

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Author's Note.

I think it helps to be just a leeeeetle bit drunk when you write something like this. Well, okay, it might not. But better to be on the safe side, eh?

Take off my shoe.

-Waltraute