Perfect Cadence
Summary: In the wake of the end of things, Faye departs on a journey of self-discovery. But when ghosts of a past life begin to haunt her own waking dream, she must decide whether to accept her reality, or fight the path Fortune has laid before her. Featuring road trips and inadvisable shots of vodka.
Rating: R
Disclaimer: I don't own anything except for the laptop this was written on. Cowboy Bebop and its characters are the property of Bandai (or is it Sunrise?) and the brainchild of Shinichiro Watanabe. Just borrowing, folks.
"So what'll it be, missy?" the toothless man behind the counter wheezes when she walks through the bar doors. The interior of the building isn't that much different from the outside—grungy, bland, and dusty—though with the addition of a bit of mold on the ceiling.
Faye had thought she'd start her new-whatever-this-is with a toast, but she's beginning to rethink her decision. She glances around the room; besides the bartender, it's just her and three other less-than-appealing individuals, who seem to be engrossed in a three-way game of checkers.
What the hell. It's not really her scene, but she's craving something to help her forget the fact that she has no idea what to do next.
"I'll have a mimosa, please," she says primly, seating herself on a stool (after surreptitiously wiping it down with a cocktail napkin). The radio stationed between bottles of whiskey lets out a low mutter, and the bartender turns around for a second, adjusting a few knobs.
"Got no bubbly," he says, now banging on the sad piece of equipment with a fist, "Whiskey, beer, or vodka." The radio groans and screeches, and Faye suddenly feels the urge to commit homicide. Now, should she aim for the man or the machine..?
Never one for self-denial, she says "Give me a double vodka and the bottle, then, and stop with the banging or I shoot the damn thing." She rests her arms on the counter and leans forward, waiting. The old man turns eventually, and looks her in the eye, and she continues, "Through you."
"...Ain't no need for violence or threats," he mutters, looking away, but the promise of business must be too sweet to pass up, because he shuffles towards the vodka without a second word.
Satisfied, Faye reaches out and starts tapping a rhythm out on the cracked wood, losing interest in the proceedings. She supposes it might be a good idea to think about what, exactly, she's doing here, to plan out a course of action instead of just winging it, like she always does.
Not that spontaneity is a bad thing. She's vaguely certain that almost every plan she's ever made has ended in danger, disappointment, or death. So then maybe thinking about this is a bad idea, and she really should just focus on her booze, because she's getting progressively more esoteric (and thus more stupid) with each spare thought.
The near-simultaneous impact of a bottle in front of her and a meteoroid in the not-so-distant distance jolts her out of her circular thoughts. She jumps a little – okay, a lot, but she plays it cool. The bartender moves further down the bar. The three men in the corner don't even twitch.
Feeling a little embarrassed, she grabs her glass and takes a long gulp. What she doesn't manage to drink somehow manages to lodge in a lung, because fuck, that is rancid. She wonders briefly how long it's been since she's kicked back straight vodka.
When she coughs, a near-invisible plume of dust drifts off the warped wood counter, and toothless wonder a few feet away shoots her a glare, scolding in a way that says 'thanks for ruining years of hard work'.
Her lip curls. "What, you were too caught up in the thriving night life to actually do your job? I thought that's what bartenders did, you know. Wiped down their bars," she says, darting a hand up to wipe a stray tear from her eye.
He ignores her in favor of turning back to the radio and giving one last turn of the dial. By some miracle, it sputters back to life.
"…chance of meteor showers in District 16 today is 60%...chance of meteor showers in District 17 today is 25%..." a too-cheerful-to-be-anything-but-a-creepy-machine voice informs the bar. The three men in the corner shush each other loudly, and even the old prune behind the counter cocks an ear while he wipes a couple of glasses.
Faye just groans and pours herself another shot. The other inhabitants of the bar seem to have frozen, and Faye tries not to judge, but she's always been shit at that, to be honest. Because, come on, it's more than a little pathetic to be that obsessed with a freaking meteorology report. Especially when it's not even accurate, most of the time.
Faye takes another shot. Her vodka goes down easy, but her mind slides even more easily into dark thoughts. Were she anywhere else besides this tragedy of a town, she would put up a fight.
She leans on an elbow and dangles her glass from her fingers. Well, Earth had been a bit of tragedy to begin with. If it's one thing people are good at, it's aiming for a big juicy twelve-point buck and somehow ending up shooting themselves in the foot. Sure, they'd managed to recover from the massive clusterfuck that was the Gate catastrophe, but Faye had always attributed that more to luck and people's ability to imitate cockroaches than actual skill.
And now people are spreading further and further into the solar system, and only God knows what new messes they'll create next.
…Fuck. She always forgets it's the clear stuff that turns her into a misanthrope (she's no Dostoevsky, something whispers, but that's insane because she's neither Russian nor well-read).
Time to pull on Poker Alice and get out of here. She yawns, mutters, "Now what?", and takes her last shot. Sometime between the meteor landing way too close for her comfort and philosophizing, she'd inhaled a good three-fourths of the vodka. It's going to be interesting getting the Redtail off the ground.
"If you're wanting a room, I recommend heading down to Tucumcari," the barkeep says, and Faye really must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, because she thought that Tucumcari only had a Mexican food joint, a gas station, and some concrete. She says as much to the barkeep.
"Where have you been? That was before the world turned into a giant piece of Swiss cheese. Tucumcari's practically urban, now." The man makes a strange shooing gesture that could either mean "Go on, get," or "Go on, finish your booze and dance the Macarena on my bartop."
Faye decides to stick with the former.
"Keep the change," she says, throwing a couple of woolongs onto the counter and standing up. The world spins for a moment, but she's used to that, so she blinks and tips a jaunty salute in the bartender's direction, and exits the bar.
Outside, the sun is kissing the horizon. A layer of dust has settled like a mist over the town—Faye inhales too much and snorts indelicately into her palm—which makes the sunset seem distant.
It's the kind of atmosphere that makes her eyelids grow heavy of their own accord (the vodka probably had something to do with that), but she pinches her arm and somehow manages to stumble over to her Redtail's hiding spot.
"Hello, baby," Faye may or may not croon to her ship's polished red surface, and imagines it gives her a happy chirrup when she opens the hatch. She has none of her usual grace as she tumbles into the cockpit: her elbow bashes against the dash, and her head ends up crammed into the space between the chair and the wall.
It's not the most comfortable position she's been in.
On the bright side, she finds her favorite hair clip and a credit chip with 20,000 woolongs, so she decides to look at it like it's meant to be.
Eventually, she rights herself, and gets her hands around the controls. The start-up sequence is so easy she doesn't have put much thought into it—actually, she's not capable of much thought at all, right now—and she goes through the motions, staring out at the way the horizon has changed from orange and reds to a light green.
The rest of the sky is all blues and purples and blacks, and wow, if Faye didn't know that most of those stars up there are just the ring of trash around the planet, she'd think she could understand why people all those years ago were obsessed with going into space.
It's an odd sight, but she has an even odder feeling that she's seen it before. Which shouldn't even be that odd, because she'd spent at least two decades here. Well, before being slapped into a freezer and shipped to Mars.
God, she'll never get over that, will she? She knows who she is, knows who Faye Valentine is today, but she doesn't quite know who she was before. Even with the video, even with going to her childhood home. She doesn't even know what her last name was, back then.
Faye does know that her younger self was naïve and optimistic to the point of pain, and that she'd been a cheerleader—which always makes her gag when she thinks about it—and that she'd looked good even then in short shorts.
(When she watched that video, Faye made sure to notice the important details.)
Then again, she doesn't know what made her younger self tick, what she felt passionate about, what her dreams were, what her favorite subject was in school, what her friends were like. She doesn't know anything in detail, and sometimes it makes her feel like a ghost.
Bah. Faye shakes her head, trying to dispel the alcohol-induced haze and crappy mood, but unfortunately, it sticks. The Redtail is purring softly, now, so she closes the hatch and sets off in a vaguely southeastern direction.
At least she hopes it's southeast. She'd put it on autopilot, except that lovely feature had been damaged when Faye spilled coffee all over the console. At the time, she'd thanked fuck she hadn't destroyed anything else; now, she's kicking herself for not getting Jet to fix it before she left.
For what could be anywhere for a few minutes to a few hours, Faye drifts in and out of focus. The world outside her ship is all blurry shapes and indescribable darkness, made more intimidating because of the particular tang of its emptiness. Space is one thing—a vacuum filled with routes from which people don't dare stray—but out here? There could be all manner of unknown quantities lurking in the nothingness.
That doesn't keep her from paying only the bare minimum of attention, though. She thinks she nods off only a few times, but that's enough. That's all it takes.
Faye falls asleep at the controls on the way to Tucumcari, and wakes up slumped over the console the next day, surrounded by broken metal and melted glass—her Redtail totaled, smoking, and embedded precariously in the side of a cliff.
Peace. Calm.
Zen.
Jet is totally, completely fine with this silence on his ship. Embraces it, even.
It's such a joy to wake up in the mornings to the sweet sound of nothing ringing through the halls. He doesn't have to fight certain people for his share of dinner, doesn't trim his bonsai to nubs when individuals bounce into the room spouting outrageous bullshit.
He doesn't even have to put up a ship-wide notice to avoid the head after he's used it.
…oh, who is he kidding? He's turning into a true hermit, the flavor of pathetic who deludes himself into thinking he's perfectly happy being alone. The kind who makes a point of relishing the sound of absolutely nothing happening.
This is ridiculous. It's time to get some human contact.
Jet makes his way to the hangar, thinking of taking the Hammerhead over to a bar and getting drunk in the company of other idiots like him, maybe finding a woman and taking her back to her apartment.
Yeah, that's what he'll do.
He walks up to the Hammerhead, then veers off, opens the hangar doors, and goes out on the deck, instead.
He ends up sitting on the edge of the Bebop, watching the hustle of the ships around him as they settle onto the waters. A few are fishing, but it's the completely wrong time of day for Rock Lobsters, and some big wig decided to make fishing for Sea Rats a grand felony, so it's not surprising that the majority of the fishing fleet are stationary.
Jet doesn't know why he expected Ganymede to be any different, since the last of his stand-in family left, but he had. And he'd been right, to an extent.
If he were to guess the reality of it, actually, he'd have to suppose that whatever changes he thinks he sees are because he sees things in a different light than he did before.
His loneliness has faded to a comfortable ache, now, more familiar to him than the thought of superficial interactions with strangers. Jet's always been the kind of fool who'd rather sit alone on his ship than fake interest in some random person's problems.
He does need to find something to do, though. He almost wishes he could go back to the ISSP and join up with the old crew again; it's where he started, where he found purpose and brotherhood.
It's starting to get darker, and the fishing trawlers are starting to drop their nets and move. Jet wonders briefly if he should move the Bebop out of the way, but they glide past him without complaint. One flashes a fisherman's hello as it passes, and he raises his arm in reply before realizing they probably can't see him in the deepening dusk.
He shrugs, sheepish, craning his head around to watch the small dark forms scramble around the surface of the passing ship, pulling and tying nets here and there, efficient in their chaos. It looks almost fun—he laughs, thinking it would be even more fun to be the one giving the orders, rather than getting coated in fish guts and rope burns.
And that's when it hits him.
Origins. Purpose.
The Bebop.
That's what he'll do.
…Does he still have those nets in the storage room? Or did Ed appropriate them for that trampoline, that one time..?
The second time she wakes up, it's a matter of moments before she remembers, squeals, and manages to bounce Ein to the next mattress over. The corgi lands on his side and whimpers, sneezing as a cloud of dust and debris explodes into the air. Ed giggles and leaps and pirouettes when she lands, shouting "TAG YOU'RE IT!" and taking off again, Ein in hot pursuit.
Sunlight is streaming in through a battalion of broken windows in the abandoned mattress factory. They'd stumbled into it last night, Ed clutching a stolen bag of tangerines and Ein gripping the handles of a bag of fried chicken feet between his teeth. Ed had thought they'd found paradise, and when she'd told her friend that, he'd just rolled his eyes and crawled onto the mattress closest to them and passed out.
They play for a while, laughter and barks spilling into the empty room, then settle down for breakfast. Ed pretends it's a feast, and she's a king surrounded by her adoring courtiers.
"Mm, yes, my good fellow, please do pass the gravy. No, not that gravy, the other one, yes, thank you." Ed whips out her virtual goggles and tightens them slightly, placing them on her brow like a crown.
Ein barks.
"What a delicious spread we have here, no? It's practically sinful!" she gives a little shimmy.
Ein gnaws on a chicken foot and ignores her.
Her goggles slip onto her face, so Ed pulls out her computer and plays around a bit, then lets out a cry of utter betrayal. "Ein, you bad puppy, you've been on Ed's computer! Without Ed!"
She scrolls through the search history—deleted files! The nerve!—and reconstructs Ein's work. "Ed thought we agreed—oh. Ooh!" Jackpot!
Ein whines and shoves his head under a mattress.
"Now now, my dear Watson," she affects a Holmesian air, "it wouldn't do to ignore the trail. There's mystery afoot!" she crows, rolling onto her side and wiggling her feet into Ein's side, ignoring his guilty squirming.
Her fingers keep dancing through the air, putting the finishing touches on her masterpiece, until finally—
"IT LIVES!" Ed jumps up and shakes her fists at the ceiling, triumphant. "Ha ha! You thought you could hide it from me, but haven't you heard?" She pauses for dramatic effect (adopted from late-night re-runs of pre-Gate soap operas) then clasps her hands under her chin, smiles, and whispers, "Puzzles are my middle name."
A stray sunbeam glances off her goggles and gives her expression an unholy light.
From under the mattress, Ein gives a doggy groan.
Two figures meet in a darkened room, their conversation almost eclipsed by the sound of machines whirring, beeping, monitoring, dispensing oxygen and blood and other fluids, disposing of waste. They stand at the foot of a bed, and with a crumple of plastic and the hiss of a match, the face of one appears briefly, then fades back to shadowed obscurity.
Inhale.
"Any change?"
"No, and they're talking about brain damage, now."
"…Shit. Really?"
Exhale. "Yeah. If there's no sign of improvement, they've got no choice but to turn it all off." The glow of the cigarette moves in a general motion around the bed.
Pause. Inhale.
"You know we can't let that happen."
Exhale. "Already looking into it. I'll have an answer by Thursday."
"Good."
One figure leaves. The other stays a moment more, staring at the bed, then nods, crushes the cigarette under one heel, and walks out the door. It closes softly.
The machines continue.
Inhale. Exhale.
Sorry for the delay. It took something of a miracle to get this chapter on the road. I have outlines and notes, though, and a vision of where this is going, and I suppose the biggest questions that I look forward to answering is: What kind of place is CB's Earth? What breed of people does it take to survive there?
And this is a standing order: if this story should ever get too far-fetched, out of hand, OOC, or just plain stupid, don't be afraid to let me know. I'm a big girl.