I woke up surprised and disappointed
to find out I was still me,
Last night should've killed me – 30 ft tall

Spike was dreaming, dreaming of beautiful women with magnificently cantilevered bosoms and flowing hair, each carrying trays full of pickled herring and beer, his favorite New Year's Eve treat, and every beautiful buxom woman was singing melodic harmonies of old twentieth century rock and roll songs, and Spike felt he could dream this lovely dream forever, if it weren't for some asshole screaming in his ear to wake up. In an attempt to block out the interruption, Spike opened one eye to find that wherever he was, it was full of too-bright lights and the exquisite kind of pain reserved for the morning after a night of too much terribly cheap tequila. But unfortunately, the pain was everywhere, everywhere over every single inch of his body.

Spike slammed his eyes shut against the light, but it didn't work for the pain. He futilely searched his body for one spot, any spot, that didn't feel like it was simultaneously exploding and imploding and then being rolled over broken glass and barbed wire. He thought he might have found a pain-free spot on the back of his left elbow, but he soon found that that spot was simply less painful than others. He figured he was, in fact, dead, but damnit, did Death have to be so noisy? He went back to whatever meditation he thought might work to reduce his knowledge of his pain level.

If I were a closed thermodynamic system, Spike thought, perhaps I would be postponing entropy.

Spike's next thought was, fuck entropy.

And the screaming in his ear began anew.

A new voice this time, softer, kinder, and oh, feminine and silky, "Shouldn't you stop? He's had such a terrible stroke . . ."

The first voice again. "I need him to wake up. He needs to show that he's still with us and not comatose."

Another voice, male, but with the slightest twinge of accent. "We know he's not comatose, Barleigh, so what the hell are you trying to prove?"

Again with the first voice, bitter, petulant, "Because, Kennedy – if that is your real name – you saw how this guy came in here looking like an extra in a slasher movie. His body's smarter than his damn head. His head had a death wish but his body said no. That's the kind of guy I want to meet."

Spike had drifted off again, drifted off on the lilts of the other two voices, back to his previous dream of the beautiful, scantily-clad women. The women were speaking what he assumed was Esperanto, even though he had never studied the language – but he also felt fairly sure that they were complimenting the chef on the fabulous meal, or perhaps asking the waitress for a three-way. Either way, it sounded wonderfully melodious.

"WAKE UP!"

Spike's eyes flashed open again, and then he squinted against the light shone into his eyes, and told the offensive doctor, or whoever the hell he thought he was, to, in the very most genteel manner possible, fuck off and die.

But his mouth wouldn't move, and no noise came out.

Spike's eyes opened again to see not one, but four doctors clustered around him. He had the notion that something was stuck down his throat, which must be what was keeping him from speaking. Fuckola, he thought. I guess I'm damned for eternity. So much for my theory that Hell would think that I'm a bad influence and not let me in.

A grizzled and tall man leaned in to look closer at him. "Good morning, Mr. Spiegel, do you know where you are? Oh, that's right, you can't talk, because you have a tube down your throat to make you breathe. But even if you didn't have a tube down your throat to make you breathe, you can't move your mouth anyway. Welcome to your first day as a stroke survivor!"

Spike narrowed his eyes and changed his focus to the lone woman in the room, a beautiful creature with a fall of chestnut hair. "Are you in a lot of pain? Blink once for yes." Blink. "We can help with that. Dr. Barleigh is right, you suffered a systemic hypoperfusion. You were bleeding terribly when you came in . . ."

Barleigh, who had straightened back up, interrupted, "Oh, don't butter him up, Thompson, he was practically wearing his guts on the outside. Like to play rough, don't you?" he said to Spike, with a knowing grin.

Thompson rolled her eyes and continued. "You also had hypoxia and you almost bled out. We had to give you coagulants to try to stem the bleeding, and then . . . a clot broke loose, so you also had an embolism."

Barleigh broke in again, "Basically, you were really fucked from the word go, but we like to play with our shiny instruments, and we were kind of bored. So we brought you back to life."

A blonde male doctor looked at Barleigh and said, "Will you stop?" Spike assumed from his accent that this was Kennedy. There was another doctor in the room, a large bald black man, who had yet to speak a word. He merely stood back and watched the proceedings, his eyes sliding back and forth between whomever was talking, with a bemused smile on his face.

Thompson spoke up again. "So we've been controlling your bleeding, but we also had to put a shunt in your skull to prevent swelling. Your lungs collapsed and you were unable to breathe on your own, and that's why you have a tube in your throat. You're on a ventilator, but we hope to take you off that soon. And we also had to do a thrombectomy for the clot in your brain . . ."

"That was fun. That's where we put a probe right up your femoral artery up to your brain. Know where your femoral artery is? If you don't, your goolies do," interjected Barleigh.

"So you do have a long recovery ahead of you, but we can't see any reason why you won't recover well."

Spike closed his eyes again. He didn't know much about strokes, other than how much they could screw up a person. He didn't know how impaired he was going to be. He knew right now he couldn't move. His arms and legs wouldn't obey any of his commands, and a machine was breathing for him. He had told Faye, before he left, that he was going to learn whether he was alive or dead. He didn't know the answer to that then.

He was even less sure now.

Suddenly, he became aware of a searing pain in his left arm. It felt as if it had been pinned between the bay doors of the Bebop, like it was being crushed. Spike's eyes flashed open and a groan escaped his lips. He was dimly aware that his left arm was twitching terribly. The unnamed doctor jumped forward and lifted Spike's left arm to examine it. Spike saw that his arm was banded tightly into a rigid splint, and it seemed as though his arm was trying to break free of it, to bend against the will of the stiff plastic. Then the same pain began in his left leg, which had a similar kind of splint on it. The unnamed doctor muttered something about upping the muscle relaxants, to which Thompson said, "Stevens, if we do that, then his blood pressure. . ."

"Oh, for fuck's sake, give him all the morphine he can stand," Barleigh snapped, as he quickly unlocked a morphine pump and upped the dose. The pain began to diminish. Stevens, that's the other one's name, thought Spike idly, as he began to drift away again. The words thank you made it to Spike's lips, but he fell into the drug-induced haze before he realized that his lips couldn't move, either.

At this point, however, Spike's mind began to fill again with the very flexible and very experimental Esperanto-speaking women from earlier, and now it seemed that Dr. Thompson was among them. That was fine with Spike. Having a doctor in a dream when he felt like this seemed like a good idea.

Jet had actually planned to remain in bed with Faye until she woke up. He thought that she would need some comfort as she remembered her pain from the day before. He thought that by the same token, he might need some comfort as well. And because Jet wasn't totally altruistic, he was half-way hoping for a little morning glory, a repeat of the damned fine sex from the night before. Yes, it was grief sex, but oh, it was still so good. Unfortunately, sometime in the night Jet's comm. began beeping incessantly. He tried to ignore it, assuming in his half-awake state that Spike must once again be in a jam. When he came fully awake and remembered the few hours, he slipped out of Faye's bed in search of the beeping comm.

Finally, he followed the sound to the bathroom, where he found the comm. in a pile of discarded clothing. He punched the talk button and grumbled, "Yeah?"

The small screen showed a brunette woman. "Mr. Jet Black?"

"Who wants to know?"

The woman frowned. "Are you the power of attorney for a Mr. Spike Spiegel?"

Power of attorney? The fuck? "Sure."

"Mr. Black, I'm Dr. Thompson, and we wanted to let you know that Mr. Spiegel is here at our hospital. He needs immediate surgery, but we can't continue without your consent. You can give it to me over this link."

"Surgery?"

"He's had two major strokes in the past few minutes, and he has several grave injuries."

"He's alive?"

Dr. Thompson frowned again. "Ye-e-e-e-e-s, he's alive. But he needs this surgery immediately."

"Go ahead." Jet was then given some more particulars regarding Spike, and he clicked off the comm. Jesus. Sweet Jesus. He lived. He needed to sit for a moment, and the most convenient spot was the toilet. Jet put the comm. on the floor and buried his face in his hands and his guts roiled with anxiety. If Spike actually lived – but the doctor said that his injuries were very grave, and he had two strokes. Jet knew about strokes; he'd watched his grandfather suffer a long and painful recovery after a relatively mild stroke. How bad off would Spike be?

Suddenly, Jet laughed. When he wakes up, Spike is going to be mightily pissed off. Then Jet choked up in despair. When he wakes up . . . If he wakes up. How bad will it be for him? Jet rubbed his face and took a deep breath, and then gathered the clothes up from the floor where they'd been dropped last night. Jet was also familiar with surgery. There was nothing he could do now but wait – wait for further news from the hospital, wait for Faye to wake up, so he could tell her.

Faye began to come awake, and was briefly startled by the fact that she couldn't open her eyes. Soon, she became coherent enough to realize that they were sealed shut by her tears. She rubbed her eyes, and grunted at how sore and puffy they felt. She sat up on one elbow before she realized that the breast pressing against her arm was naked.

What the? Faye was not a person who normally went to bed without clothes, and despite what the men on the Bebop thought of her, she was not inclined to finding herself unexpectedly nude in a bed. Then she remembered the previous night, when Jet. . .Oh dear, she thought, as she looked over her shoulder to see that Jet was no longer there.

Faye sighed as she stood up on shaky legs. While she didn't expect Jet to be there when she woke up, considering that they just used each other for relief from their grief, she was still a bit disappointed. Confused and groggy, Faye donned a robe to find a shower, to find some more relief in hot water. On her way, she saw her clothes from yesterday, the ones that Jet pulled off of her before he put her in the shower, carefully folded on the corner of her bed. She reached down and gently touched the fabric, and bit her lip, buoyed by even this small act of kindness. Tears pricked her eyes once again before she shook her head in an attempt to stop this softness. Faye needed to collect herself before she saw Jet, to rebuild that hard shell exterior that she so carefully maintained. She couldn't fail herself now.

After primping herself to full Faye-dom, she sashayed down the corridor, hot on the trail of breakfast cooking. She turned the corner into the kitchen doorway, but stopped short at the sight of Jet's back, lean and muscular, as he stirred something on the stove.

"Faye."

Faye jumped. How did he know I was here? "Jet."

"How are you this morning?"

"Fine," chirped Faye, and she plunked her self down at the table, reaching for the coffee mug already doctored by Jet. He always remembered how she liked her coffee, even during those times when he was ostensibly completely pissed off at her. Spike, on the other hand, never knew what the hell color shirt he himself was wearing, much less paid attention to anything that she did, unless he found it annoying. However, the thought of Spike gave Faye a fresh pang, and she hid it by blowing on the hot coffee to cool it.

Jet slid a perfectly folded omelet onto a plate and put it in front of her. Rarely did he give her food without several words regarding her laziness and how she didn't pull her own weight. Faye caught Jet's eye briefly before he turned away. A gift, she thought. A thank-you for last night. How gallant.

"They found Spike," Jet said suddenly, his back still to Faye. Her fork stopped halfway to her mouth, and she closed her eyes for a minute.

"They did?"

"Yeah." Jet slid another omelet onto a plate of his own and sat across from Faye.

Faye put her fork down. "Do we need to . . . go identify the body?"

Jet frowned as he shook pepper over his plate. "He's alive."

Faye's eyes grew wide. "What?"

"He . . . he lived." Jet kept his eyes on his plate. "I got a call a few hours ago. The hospital needed my permission to send him into surgery. I haven't heard anything else since."

Faye was trembling. "And you didn't tell me?"

Jet looked back at her. "You were asleep."

Faye slammed her chair back from the table and stomped out of the room.

Ein had been dreaming about chasing small furry creatures across the moors of a long-ago country. The unspeakable chasing the uneatable, thought Ein. Who said that? Why am I so tired? Ein opened one eye to see Faye moving quickly towards the common area, with Jet following.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Faye demanded.

"Faye, please. There wasn't much information, and we didn't have time to go into it. He had to go into surgery immediately. I didn't want to wake you because there wasn't much to tell. And I thought you needed to rest." He reached out and touched Faye's shoulder, which she jerked away. "I'm sorry."

Faye kept her back to Jet, and dashed a tear from her face with the side of her hand. "Did they say how bad it was?"

"He had very bad injuries. He almost completely bled out, and then he had two strokes, one right after another." Jet watched Faye tremble, and then she buried her face in her hands. He put his arms around her, and she turned into his embrace, crying once again. "I don't know anything else, Faye. All we can do now is wait for news. C'mon, we need to eat something, and then we'll both go down to the hospital. Okay?" Faye nodded, and Jet produced a handkerchief for Faye, and they both made their way back into the kitchen to attempt to eat, to attempt to continue living while they waited.

Well, they have to wait, but let's see what I can find, thought Ein, as he reached again for the hospital charting software. This program is full of bugs. How in the world do they keep patients alive using this old thing? Ein found that Spike had indeed survived the surgery, and was more or less awake, depending on how doped-up he needed to be for his pain. He had suffered near depletion of blood, two strokes, and any number of life-threatening injuries at the hands of Vicious. He had also experienced extremely low pulse oxygen, possibly further causing brain damage. Brain damage . . . in addition to what he caused himself on a regular basis. There will be a long recovery process, probably in his motor functions. Will he even want to recover?

Ein went back to look in the police report. He was able to discern that Vicious was positively identified, pronounced dead on arrival at the same hospital. Still, he was relieved to find out that Vicious was now no more. Ein also managed to find that Mao's paperwork, had, in fact, been completely above board, so Spike's hospital bills would be completely taken care of for the time being. And as a bonus, since the firestorm, the Red Dragons were now being dismantled with Spike being beneficiary once the financials were finally figured out. Ein was amused by the ease of finding out all this information.

Humans. They get all bent out of shape when someone hacks their files, yet they make it so easy.

How right you are, Ein responded to the other voice in his head idly.

Before Jet and Faye left for the hospital, however, Ein had to not-so-gently remind them to feed him, which once again left Ein feeling like a regular dog, but not in a good way this time. If my creators wanted to make me actually be useful, they would have given me opposable thumbs.

Thumbs are wasted on humans.

How right you are again, Ein replied.