"Adrift Over the Rings of Saturn" A/N: There's some canon-bending with regards to Faye's reactions to Julia. I honestly believe that Faye was frightened by Julia (because who wouldn't be?), but teaming up with her was an option, so she couldn't have been as terrified as I made her out to be. Keep in mind though that Faye is reflecting on her time with Julia a couple of months after the end of the series, when the damage the cow did is more blatant. (Oh, all RIGHT, fine, I'll try to be fair to Julia... sheesh).

William Gibson's coined the term "street samurai," along with "cyberspace," in his book "Neuromancer." All honor to him for that one, not me. It's too good not to use here, though, but remember, every time you see it, it's not mine, it's Gibson's.

KARMA: Adrift Over the Rings of Saturn

Just what had he planned to do with Julia, anyway? Faye fumes, gunning the Redtail into a fuel-wasting tailspin over Saturn's ice rings. Shards of ice refract the light from Sol, splashing it across her cockpit bubble like meltwater.

Julia was a killer. Permafrosted, an emotionless gunbitch. Street samurai. Assassin. A drop of sweat drifts free from Faye's forehead to float in front of her eyes.

She'd been terrified the whole time she was in Julia's company. Terrified that the woman would smell Faye's love for her man and turn her guns on her; that she would ask Faye questions she didn't want, couldn't answer; that she would use Faye as a way to Spike. And a deeper terror. Sitting next to Julia had been like—

—like being around Spike in his worst moods, when he can kill you by accident in a single blind moment. Oh sure, he'll feel bad about it when he comes around, but that won't help you, dead on the floor with a broken neck or a bullet in the brain—

—like sitting next to Vicious, breathing his self-hatred and loneliness and pain and knowing none of it really touched him, he exhaled it all like poison—

No. The real terror of being near Julia was the awareness that she alone possessed the ability to restore Spike to what he used to be. A warrior, a wanderer flowing with the blood of the beast, just like her. And together they would flee, the two beautiful, hunted, dangerous animals, to die a swift and ugly death on some distant hunk of rock.

Because no matter how Faye flips it in her mind, she can't see how the Julia she'd met and the Spike she knows could have ever lived the life of Joe and Gina Normal. Julia was a killer, and her mate was the killer in Spike—not the goofy, clumsy, idiot-genius charm boy Spike can often be.

Which is the Spike Faye wants. Not the one who busts heads with his boot heel. Though she'll take that one too as part of the bargain.

But she's beginning to wrap her head around the concept that she isn't going to have any part of Spike, ever, and she isn't going to have a family, and she isn't going to have a home. The Redtail is her only possession, and a stolen one at that.

She's a thief, as much a thief as Spike is a murderer—it's in her, and if she focuses it, maybe she can pull off miracles. She doesn't want to, is all. She doesn't want to live her life stealing everything she calls her own—and nothing she wants is going to be given to her. She learned that lesson when she lay down in the stick-figure bed she'd drawn in the ruins of her family's home.

So if she can't steal it and it won't be a gift, she has to earn it. Faye, adrift now over the ice rings of Saturn, knows she hasn't earned one thing she has in this do-over life of hers.