"Distant Little Spark" A/N: I've always thought it odd that Faye never gets injured, with the risks she takes and the life she leads, but I guess the animators didn't want to draw scars on her. This was a hard section to write because I wanted to avoid using Faye's injury for pity. Like Spike and Jet, she gets shot, and nobody cares much. Fact of life on the Bebop. And yes, I am going to put her in a different outfit from here on in. I loathe that thing she always wears. The woman needs some dignity.
KARMA: Distant Little Spark
Light. Round, dirty, translucent plastic shield. Set in a dented and be-webbed bulkhead.
Familiar odors: stale cigarette smoke, spilled beer, cold coffee, dust, sweat, a whiff of wet dog. Scratchiness of rough old fabric. Lumps pressing against her lower back.
Something makes a repetitive, hollow tap-tap-tap-tap sound, senseless and irritable as a snake's rattle.
Her voice is rough with sleep. "Strange Afterlife. Now I know how you must feel when you wake up here."
"Don't flatter yourself." Spike's voice, somewhere behind and above her. The tapping comes from the same place. "It's a flesh wound with delusions of grandeur. Lucky the guy was such a suck shot. If you'd've kept your act together, you could have helped me out with Job."
"Well, forgive me for not ever having been shot before. I'm not used to it," Faye says. She struggles to sit up and gasps. "Aaah, ow."
A bandage swaths her midsection. She presses it, experimentally, until she finds the bit that really hurts. Lower right-hand side, just beneath her ribs.
She twists to look at Spike, sitting on the stairs kicking his heel against a metal riser, and points an accusing finger at her side. "What are you talking about, a flesh wound? There's a lot of important stuff right here! I could be dying even as we speak!"
"You're not dying if you can make that much noise," Spike snaps, standing and stuffing his hands in his pockets.
Faye reaches for her cigarettes. "It feels weird," she says, contemplating the pain. Deep. Bad. Sort of nauseating, burning.
There's a hole in her. She has trouble wrapping her head around that concept—a little piece of metal bored right through her. Lighting a smoke, she asks, "What happened?"
Spike snorts. "You got your ass shot off. Bullet passed through. Jet found it in the wall if you want a souvenir." He tosses her a tiny, misshapen lump of metal. Faye juggles it for a second and then drops it with a sound of disgust. He snaps his fingers, jittering in place, more nervous than Faye's ever seen him.
"Only Jet would think of something so morbid," Faye says, inhaling. That hurt too, deep inside. She presses her hand against her flank as though to hold something in.
"Fine, then I'll keep it. A souvenir," he says, crossing the living room to pick up the bullet. "I'll pretend it was my shot. My prized possession." He tosses it up in the air and catches it, grinning.
His words and his smile are a slap in her face. She looks at the floor. "You son of a bitch," she says. "That's not funny. You may get off on getting shot, but it doesn't feel so great to me."
He stops jittering, as suddenly still as an electrical device unplugged from the socket. "I don't get off on it." His voice isn't mocking anymore, but she won't look at him.
Chair springs squeal as he sits. Silence, then a click as he puts the bullet on the coffee table. Faye glances up then and regards the slug, the way the overhead light plays over its distorted shape. That's been in me, she thinks.
No dice. She still can't do it, can't imagine that little thing as the cause of the pain in her flank. She fiddles with the ties of the bandage, considering unwrapping it to get a look at the wound. Even with the pain, it doesn't seem real, that she's been shot, that she's feeling what Spike and Jet have felt.
She looks at him. He's paler than usual, hair wild as though he's been running his hands through it, circles under his eyes. The marks of some strain. She knows better than to pretend it's because of her. Was he injured? His expression tells her nothing.
He exhales in a short burst. "Look, you know I didn't mean that. It just pissed me off, the way you hesitated. You should have opened fire the same time I did."
Faye checks an angry retort and says, "Fair enough. I did hesitate."
Her hand shakes as she brings the cigarette up for another drag. The long tube of gray ash on its end tumbles off to smear the mustard-colored couch. Because the last thing she wants is for Spike to get all curious about why she hesitated, she asks quickly, "Job? We get him?"
"Yeah. He's in the hold. We're taking him to Mars to turn him in."
"Anything else happen?" Slowly, grudging herself each word, she asks, "Were you hurt?"
"Got shot up with some fucking downer Job had on him, but other than that, no."
The rug is crusted with dirt, fibers sticking up every which-way like Spike's hair. The dust grains bounce light and she stares at the distant little sparks, hating herself for being so relieved.