"What are you going to do? Just throw your life away as if it was nothing?"
"I'm not going there to die. I'm going to find out if I'm really alive. I have to do it, Faye."
He's already facing away from her. He leaves. Her trembling hands grasp her revolver, and shots ring out, one after another.
Please stay. Please. Maybe this'll wake you up.
But he doesn't turn. He moves on. He leaves.
She hates Vicious. She hates him for achieving what she'd thought to be impossible. And that he made it look easy. As if cutting down someone as indomitable and pigheaded as Spike Spiegel had been a simple matter of lashing out with a saber. Somewhere in the depths of her subconscious, she could have guessed that Spike's past would be his downfall. She just hadn't expected it to happen so literally.
She hates that Vicious has gotten away with it. She hates that he's denied her the thrill of tracking him down, of playing cat-and-mouse until she finally bags him and hands him over to the ISSP. She especially hates that she didn't get to cash in on his bounty. Maybe it would have bought Spike a nice headstone, at the very least. Or maybe she would have blown it all on the ponies. Either way, Vicious' death means a whole lot of cold, hard cash that's not sitting in her hands right now. If only she could have gotten something out of this mess. Something aside from the crushing weight of her memories, drowning her in sweat when she wakes in the middle of the night, convinced that Spike is there and he's trying to wake her up because Big Shots is on and she's missing some valuable information about their next bountyhead.
She hates that nothing like that will ever happen again. And she hates Vicious for what he took away from her.
"I'm not going there to die. I'm going there to find out if I'm really alive. I—"
"But you ARE alive!" Her voice tears through the echoing interior of the ship, silencing whatever nonsense had been about to come out of his mouth. She reaches up and presses her fingertips to the side of his neck, feeling his pulse throb at her touch.
"You ARE alive," she repeats in more of a breath than a word. "I'm alive, too. See?"
He lingers. He stays.
She hates Julia. She hates Julia for asking her to pass along a message that essentially guaranteed disaster for Spike. Was she cognizant of the fact that she was laying a trap, dangling irresistible bait in front of Spike's nose? It's impossible to say. Maybe Julia was every bit as trapped in the past as Spike was. She hates her for that, too.
She hates Julia for getting herself killed, and she hates that she doesn't know the details. Was it over in one shot? Did she linger for a few moments to gasp her last words? Did Spike get to say goodbye to her? If he had, wouldn't he have realized that there was nothing he could do that would fix everything, not even taking down the people responsible? His only viable move would have been to live with what had happened. But he hadn't wanted to live, had he?
She hates the hold that Julia had on Spike, how the sound of her name had been enough to send him off on a wild goose chase, how shamelessly he'd referred to her as his other half. How he had been surrounded by people other than her, day in and day out, and in the end it hadn't been worth a damn because Julia was just that much more important to him.
She hates that after ten minutes alone with Julia, she knows exactly why Spike couldn't let her go. And she hates knowing that in his position, she might have done exactly what he did.
"I'm not going there to die. I'm going to find out if I'm really alive. I have to do it, Faye."
He moves on. He leaves. She hoists her revolver and fires. Not into the air, to see him off, but into him. Blood erupts from his shoulder, and he stumbles back, his hand automatically flying to the wound.
Her voice is calmer than it's ever been. "Are you alive now?"
He turns. He's not happy. But he stays.
She hates Jet. She hates that he knew what was going to happen but he didn't do anything, as if it wasn't his business with which to interfere. Perhaps she should have expected it, because it falls directly in line with her old beliefs of living in a dog-eat-dog world. Survival of the fittest is the law of nature, she remembers saying once, but any time she'd brought that up, Jet had scoffed at her. He had never believed that, up until he apparently had, and she hates him for changing his mind.
Weren't they friends? She'd never expected Jet to go out of his way to save her, but when it came to Spike… They had a history, one that she'd assumed was every bit as rich as whatever lay between Spike and Vicious. But at the end of the day, he hadn't even tried to help Spike. She hates to think that it hadn't mattered to him.
"Get a hold of yourself, Faye!" he'd fired at her when she'd stormed in with her ears ringing from the day's news. "Do you honestly think I could have stopped him? Do you honestly think he would have listened?"
She doesn't have any answers for Jet. But she hates that he never gave her the chance to find out. And she hates that she knows he's right.
"I'm not going there to die. I'm going there to find out if I'm really alive. I have to do it, Faye."
He moves, but she won't let him escape, not yet. She catches up to him and plants herself in front of him, grabbing his arms.
"If this is something you HAVE to do… I'm not letting you do it alone."
He leaves, and she leaves with him.
She hates Spike. She hates his determination and bravery and flexibility, because all those traits added up to in the end were stubbornness, recklessness, and short-sightedness. She hates that he just couldn't let it go. Once upon a time, she'd grown weak-kneed with relief once he'd come to rescue her from the Red Dragon Syndicate, before eventually realizing that what had played out in the church that day was just a small piece of a larger puzzle. He'd walked away from it at some point. Why couldn't he have stayed away? Why did he insist on paddling back across the river over which he'd once constructed the bridges that he'd burned?
She hates Spike's artificial eye and how he'd seen her through it, but he hadn't really seen her. That she had placed herself directly in front of him– presenting herself as living, breathing proof that his life wasn't over, that he was really alive, because he'd found her and she'd stayed– and he, just as easily, was able to turn away and move along. She hates that he nearly made her beg for him. She doesn't believe in making herself so vulnerable. But she hates that, because of Spike, she could have.
She hates Spike when she finds out what did him in. There was still time, she wants to rage at the news report. You could have called for help. You could have walked it off like you did for every other dumb injury you ever got. There was still time! Instead he'd lain there like a pile of discarded laundry, bleeding out onto the stone steps beneath him, and no one who'd been there to witness it had so much as lifted a finger. Despite everything he had said to her before he left, he had gone there to die.
She hates that he'd done nothing to save himself. And she hates that there was nothing that she could have said or done that would have saved him.
"What are you going to do? Just throw your life away as if it was nothing?"
She listens to his response. She watches him walk away. She fires her revolver into the air. She does nothing else.
She hates herself. More than Vicious, more than Julia, more than Jet, more than Spike.
Above all, she hates herself.