Playing Poker

By Soyokaze

Faye looked out the window, nervously flipping card after card of the deck between her fingers and in her palms. The stars were brilliant, especially in the dead of night- she turned, her dark hair flowing about her face like silk, and her eyes came to rest on the red digital numbers of the bedside clock. One thirty-five. Her sea-colored eyes moved to the sleeping figure on the bed. He’d been that way for nearly a whole day, his lithe figure bathed in bandages, three packets of blood flowing in and through his oxygen-deprived body, near death for an entire twenty-four hours.

And she’d been here.

Jet had come in earlier, when they first received news of his registration at the hospital. He’d frowned in what Faye imagined he meant to be depreciation, but she could tell what was going through his head. He hadn’t even stayed a whole five minutes; he was repairing the Bebop, repairing the Swordfish II, repairing her own ship, repairing everything in sight. His mask of anger had been easy to see through. The Bebop’s proprietor called her routinely every three hours on the dot, under the pretense of angrily demanding she return to the ship. She bore the abuse, if only to become a focus point for the emotions he was feeling. She understood the harsh comments he made were not sincere.

Ed was a mess. She walked in with a smile, and out with a smile, but she had protested in earnest when Jet told her to leave. The cheerful sparkle in her eyes was gone. Her smile was now devoid of happiness, but not of her never-dying optimism. Faye had told her what had happened, and she had replied to the older woman in a voice Faye had never heard before, a voice so full of assurance, comfort, and wisdom Faye had trouble realizing it came from within their thirteen-year-old partner.

“It’s all right, Faye-Faye. He won’t dream anymore. He hated dreaming.”

Faye almost collapsed in tears as she said that. She would never know everything Spike had hidden inside himself. She would never know about his and Julia’s relationship, or about his and Vicious’s relationship; both of them were dead now, and Spike seemed to want death so badly he was throwing himself at its mercy. She would never be a part of the past he tried so earnestly to leave behind.

But she didn’t want to be part of his dream. She wanted to be part of his reality.

Faye turned her gaze back out the window, examining the stars for constellations, still expertly transferring her deck of cards from one hand to another in the fluid, innate motions of Poker Alice. Fervently analyzing a belt of stars she believed would lead her to Orion, she caught sight of a star so bright it almost dwarfed the other lights in the sky. Faye felt a strange nostalgia as she watched it flicker, its intensity refusing to be put out.

Then, strangely and abruptly, it died.

Faye gasped, stood there in shock. It was only a star, she told herself, ashamed at her superstitious reaction. Nevertheless, she found herself at Spike’s bedside, sitting in one of the cheaply upholstered leather chairs the hospital seemed to be fond of. His bad eye was covered by bandages due to a serious head wound he’d received; his neck and shoulders were swathed in white over wounds from shrapnel and stray bullets; his breathing was laborious and harsh, even in sleep. The constant crackling sound of the cards moving between her hands seemed deafening. A small, almost inaudible click sounded as the time changed to one thirty-six. It was then, miraculously, that Spike began to stir.

The cards ceased their activity as Faye’s grip on the deck tightened immeasurably, so that they began to crumple in her hands. She failed to notice as she leaned forward, watching Spike’s one visible burgundy eye open a sliver. His gaze fell on her.

“Idiot,” she muttered to him, a smile full of emotions on her face. She had expected the utter hatred visible in his eyes.

“You should have let me die,” he said, still managing to communicate his loathing with a voice hoarse and damaged. Faye maintained her smile. This was exactly what she had expected from him. That should have scared her; Spike was normally anything but predictable. Under the circumstances, she understood his dislike for her. If Jet had been here, he would have been on the other end of that hatred. Even Ed would have displeased him if he had woken up to see her. It was because they were the ones responsible for keeping him alive.

“Why?” she asked tenderly, knowing she was infuriating him, but not knowing how to avoid it.

“Julia is dead. Vicious is dead. Why can’t the world let me die? Everything I ever had is gone. I did what I needed to do.” He was sinking deeper into his pit of anger and pain. It hurt Faye to hear the words, but it hurt her more to see him how he was. This was not the Spike she knew.

“Not everything, Spike,” she scolded him. “What I really meant was, why can’t you look past them?” Spike remained silent. He would not dignify her question with a response. “They are dead, and we know this causes you pain. But the fact remains that they are dead. The Red Dragon syndicate is all but collapsing. There will be no more syndicate assassins after you. This ‘old life’ you had; there’s nothing left of it-”

“You would not understand,” he said caustically. Faye frowned at him.

“Why? Because I didn’t have an old life? Because I wasn’t in an accident that constituted just as fake a death as your own? Because I didn’t wake up a million years later, in a world where I had no family, no friends, no home, where the past I had seemed like-” she stopped. Faye looked straight into his one visible eye. “Like a dream.”

Spike turned his head slightly and resigned himself to looking at the wall, a childish gesture that infuriated her. “You have a new life, Spike! Your old life is gone! It won’t haunt you anymore!” The woman slammed her deck of cards down on his bedside table, the stack collapsing in a sideways fashion and a number of cards fluttering to the ground and to her chair, which she had risen from at some point in her tirade. A fury of the feelings she had for each crew member of the Bebop soared in her heart, and she found herself wondering why her idiot of a male cohort couldn’t feel those emotions as well. “Do you have any idea why we wanted to keep an ungrateful son-of-a-bitch like you alive? Do you know why Ed stopped laughing? Why Jet is working himself to death on his machines because he doesn’t know what else to do? Why I’ve been sitting here, flipping a deck of cards in my hands like a moron, for twenty hours? Because we care about you, Spike-” she fell into her chair, wiping away thick streams of tears that began sometime in the middle of her angry lecture. “Damn it, Spike- we do-” She was a step away from hysteria, and now she found herself consciously controlling her breathing, reigning her fury. “And I’ll be damned if I’m not thinking you don’t give a flying fuck about us.”

She couldn’t see Spike’s expression, and she thought to herself that she probably didn’t want to; she might have a fit and kill him. Instead, she kept her eyes hidden with her hand. She was surprised at the next words that came out of his mouth.

“No one can replace her.”

Her head snapped up at the change of tone in his words. He was sad, melancholy. Faye didn’t have to ask him who was the woman he spoke of.

“She was the one who made me afraid to die. Now that she’s gone- I don’t really feel like making an effort anymore. I haven’t met anyone else who could make me afraid of death.”

“No one can replace her, Spike,” Faye said in a carefully controlled measure of voice, hiding her pain at his words, “because you can’t let her go.”

There was silence for a long moment. Spike continued looking at the ceiling, not showing a change of expression; Faye’s expression remained concealed under her hand. Spike flexed his fingers apprehensively, and touched upon a thin paper object. One of the cards from Faye’s violently disturbed deck had landed near his arm. Curious, he picked it up and looked at the number.

The queen of hearts.

His eye widened, and he made a tiny noise, something like a gasp. Faye looked up to see something she never thought she would see in all the years she’d lived, was living, and would live.

Spike was crying.

The tears were silent, firm, dignified, how she imagined they would be if he ever reduced himself to weeping, to feeling. The card, the queen of hearts, fluttered to the ground, unnoticed. He propped his head against one of his hands, looking tired beyond comparison. Faye stood, cautious.

“Julia-” he muttered, his good eye falling on her form. “I loved you.”

In that moment, Faye realized what she had to do. He was seeing her as Julia, the spectre of a woman he had tried so hard to be with; but Julia had always been unreachable. Somewhere in his heart, Spike had to understand that.

She moved so she could sit next to him on the bed without hurting him any further. Gently, carefully, lest she jar him back into reality, she placed an arm around him, and coaxed him back down to lay on the pillow. It was now, now his past had been killed, that he was ready to leave Julia behind. Now was the time to do what Spike had refrained from all these years, and thus refrained from leaving his old world, making his new world superimposed over his past. And that was mourning.

Slowly, she began to hum.

It was the song from the music box, so long ago. He muttered something, asking her to keep singing, and she did. She kept singing as his eyes fell closed and he slept, and she stroked his thick hair and cried herself to sleep beside him.

--

Yes. Yes, I know. Before you even say anything, I couldn’t think of a better or more poetic ending for Bebop than... how it ended (I don't want to ruin it). This is just a little vignette that popped into my head as I was watching the movie. Even though I’m sure fury was pumping through your veins, I hope you enjoyed it!