Disclaimer: If I owned Cowboy Bebop, I might have ended things differently. (Read it with the ending music 'Blue', I think it adds to the story.)
You only live twice: Once when you're born and once when you look death in the face – Ian Fleming.
They say that you will view life differently when you have escaped from brushing shoulders with death's foreboding wings. So no, Spike Spiegel was not afraid of dying, not when he had brushed past death so many times in his life he could turn up on its doorstep and still be welcomed back like an old friend.
They also say that your life flashes past your eyes before you die, a montage of photographs from distant memories consisting of the good, the bad and the unwanted, including the little forgotten things like pieces of garlic amidst green peppers and the recent visions of blood and haunting gunfire.
Before Julia, life was adrenaline rush. It was the cold blade of danger kissing the vein of his neck and the joy of laughing in its face whenever he and Vicious stood back to back taking down enemy after enemy. There was nothing more exhilarating than going against all odds and emerging from the hellfire, reborn with the feeling of renewed life and vigor. Back then, there had been nothing to lose except his own life and he gambled it like it was nothing. For he had nothing.
Until the night he had finished with a round of billiards and had turned around only to find his heart failing a beat at the sight of her. He could never find the right words to describe her as nothing matched up. No words were full enough for the soft, golden glow of light which shone into the depths of his soul, penetrating and engulfing him in sensuous whispers and a delicate, new kind of danger he had come to know of as just...Julia. In those days, life was brighter, vivid alight with warm colours only the love from finding one's soul mate could bring. But at the same time, it was darker somehow, dripping with unease beneath the short-lived tenderness and for the first time in his life he tasted fear. Fear that what they had would burn too bright too fast and shatter in their faces in a blur of wrathful black feathers and bitter steel.
After Julia, life was back to living on the edge of the knife. Life was the same old bluesy metal tune except it kept missing a beat. Life was 'qing jiao rou si' without the meat. It was coming back to a battered old ship belonging to a battered old man with only one arm in a makeshift home revolving in space and time. It was lived through the roar of the Swordfish's engine as he plummeted through liquid skies diving between the lines of life and death till they merged to form one big blur of nothingness. Then, it became waking up daily to the sounds of hungry barking, frantic computer typing to a techno beat, and the exchanging of snarky remarks with a bitchy tomboy. It had not been much but in the very least it was a constant, a temporary anchor in the eye of the storm yet not heavy enough to settle.
Yet when the sword swings down in a final arc, singing out its swan song drenched in curtains of red, Spike Spiegel remembers. Shared laughter over thunderous gunshots, cold beers at smoky bars filled with outdated jazz tunes, the feel of someone's rough hand grasping onto his and yanking him to safety, random bits of conversation over the most insignificant of things. He looks over at his falling enemy, recalls the long forgotten smile of an old friend under the mask of dirty, gritty silver, and finds a burdening urge to laugh welling up inside him.
Vicious eh, that's a terrible name.
Like yours is any better. I can think of a few things that rhyme with Spike.
Still, Spike and Vicious, it has a pretty good ring to it.
That it does.
He recalls the softness of Julia's hands with the beloved callouses on her fingers as he imagines her trying to pull him to his feet. He remembers the fading angel's light behind her smile, her gentle stream of laughter the sound of summer rain, the delicateness of her touch as though he were the one who might break. With this, he manages to stumble slowly down the stairs with her waiting for him at the bottom, arms wide to receive him should he fall.
Hey, do I know you from somewhere?
If that's a pick-up line, that's one of the worst so far.
Ah, so no harm trying again right? I've heard that practice makes perfect.
I'm kidding, you might have seen me around Vicious a few times.
Oh. I remember now, you're his…girlfriend.
The corners of his mouth turn up a bit despite himself at that hazy memory. He wonders if things would have turned out differently if he had met Julia and Vicious under different circumstances, maybe they wouldn't be where they were now and he wouldn't be stumbling to join them.
The image of Jet's burly figure standing in the small kitchen tossing up green peppers sans meat in a large wok flashes past and for a moment, he imagines it all to be a dream in which he was still lying on his couch breathing in the aroma of fried vegetables.
Well? How's that sound? I get a place to rest my head and you get my humble self bringing in the loot.
What? You want me to team up with the likes of you? We'd be broke in no time!
It wouldn't be complete without a dog barking and thumping its tail in delight at the sight of a crazy kid with orange hair as eye-blinding as neon lights.
Where the hell did you go, Ed!
Spike-person! Ed was in lalaland and ate a purple floating goop monster!
You what!
And of course there had to be that crazy bitch who always got on his nerves. But then again, life had been almost fun when there was someone to argue with on a daily basis, someone to take your shit and throw it back at you. At this, a sudden vision of desperate, accusatory green eyes drifts to the forefront of his hazy mind, yelling out words which rammed into his head with the unrelenting clarity of bullet shots.
Why do you have to go? Where are you going? What are you going to do, just throwing your life away like it was nothing!
I'm not going there to die. I'm going to find out if I'm really alive.
He cracks a smile recalling his own words. So have I uncovered the answer yet, he wonders, what does it mean to really be alive anyway? He had been the one left behind, passed over, narrowly escaping death as though he were the brunt of one of God's twisted, unholy bets. A tiger striped cat with one too many lives. And now, facing what could be his last moments, he finds himself thinking if Julia was right. If life were really nothing more than a dream and when he wakes up he will find himself back at the beginning before he had killed his best friend, before he had walked out on the Bebop leaving a weeping mess behind, before Julia, before the syndicate…But he knows he will most likely tread the same path again, after all, Spike Spiegel was never one to live with regrets, though it didn't mean he would die without them.
Perhaps he really had been alive all along and was only finding out now. He wasn't afraid of dying, no, he was afraid of living, of breathing and walking around with a haunted past stapled to his shadows no matter how fast and hard he ran away from it. In the end, he was the kind of wretched bastard who had to die along with his past to be free of everything, and to hell if he dragged everyone along with him down his road of self-destruction. If anything, he was a man who did all things with a single, true purpose. A man whose only way of living life was to fight it all the way through, blazing like fireworks until he burnt out into cinders.
And in typical Spike-fashion, he would never go down without passing up the chance of laughing in the faces of life and death one last time and throwing the world something to remember him by. With one final grin and feeling lighter on his feet than he ever had, he raises his arm and decides that Spike Spiegel has indeed lived and gone out with a –
"Bang."
You're gonna carry that weight.