Work Text:
The money she gets from the last bounty goes towards more hospital bills. Jet splits the difference. They both live off of the expired food in the freezer for two days, and they both get sick, and they both suffer through it all without complaining because neither of them really have anything to say.
Spike wakes up on Tuesday.
-
He opens his eyes slowly, readjusts. Then he looks at her, sitting curled in on her herself on the hospital seat, and he looks pale and strange and still kind of dead and he says in a throaty voice, “Jesus, Faye, I never took you for a cryer.”
His blood has dried underneath her nails. She will never unlearn the fear he taught her by leaving.
She scrubs her eyes. “I'm just so disappointed. I thought you were really dead.”
Spike laughs - then he doubles over, pained, and starts wheezing.
Serves you right, she thinks, and then Jet is standing in the doorway, looking at Spike with shadows under his eyes and a stunned, earnest smile he makes sure to get rid of before he walks in.
-
They’d found him before morning broke and hefted him back onto the ship together. Jet could have done it alone and they’d both known it, but he’d let Faye take some of the weight. He’d probably known that she needed it, then.
Her legs hadn’t shook like she’d worried they would, and Jet hadn’t said anything about whether he was dead or alive like she’d wanted him to. Spike had hung between them heavily as they walked, hung there and bled.
“Go fish,” he says. He stifles an obnoxiously big yawn into his shoulder.
Faye curses and picks up another card. Still no luck. “Can’t we play something interesting?”
“Faye, nobody wants to play poker with a cheat.”
“A notorious cheat,” Jet adds, frowning down at his own hand.
She scoffs. “You guys are just afraid of getting your asses beat.”
Spike eyes her over his cards and says, mouth twitching, “Twos.”
“God damnit!” she hisses, and throws the card at his face.
-
The nurses keep nagging at Faye for smoking and giving cigarettes to the sick patients. Normally she and Spike have a strict no sharing policy when it comes to - well, anything, but he looks like shit and Faye is nothing if not a philanthropist, and none of this is normal, anyway.
“Geez, when do you get out of here already?” she asks, slouching in her seat to kick her feet up on the bedside table. “If I get one more lecture I’m gonna start bringing my gun in here.”
Spike lights up a cigarette and inhales, and Faye sees it, every tiny motion of it from the flick of his thumb to the slow part of his mouth, and turns sharply to face the window.
“Maybe I’ll stay here,” he says. He taps the ash into the bedside vase with the ugly fake flowers in it and tucks his other hand under his head. “Three meals a day, a decent bed, a nurse to walk me three feet to the toilet. Not so bad, is it?”
“You’re not the one paying for this sad little holiday,” Faye says, looking at her nails.
The hospital bed creaks when he sits up. “Guess you’re right. I’d pay you back some day if I didn’t know it’d all end up going to waste.”
He smiles at her, a bit tired looking, but not the kind of tired he used to be. Faye would know; she’s been expecting that old look in his eyes to come back any day now, been looking for it hard enough.
He passes her the cigarette and she closes her eyes and takes a long, long drag.
“You owe me,” she says. “You don’t even know how much you owe me, Spike.”
He’s quiet for a moment.
“You know, most friends don’t act like debt collectors.”
She gives the cigarette back to him and looks out the window again. She hates Mars, intimately, more than anywhere else she’s ever been.
“I’m not sure we are friends,” she says.
All of Faye’s friends are dead. Jet and Spike are just some drifters she drifted with and Ed was like the pet she never wanted - and even she didn’t bother to stick around for a goodbye.
“We should change that, then,” Spike says, quietly.
She turns to him, surprised.
There’s something different about him since he came back, something she can’t put her finger on, and it’s more apparent now than ever. It’s like he’s here - really here.
He passes the cigarette back again, watching her with a teasing quirk to his mouth, and in a cloud of smoke asks, “So?”
So, Faye thinks.
She clucks her tongue. “I’ll think about it.”
-
She and Jet hit a few small bounties over the next few days. They get enough cash for some food and a decent bit of fuel, but not enough for one of the Pembroke Welsh Corgi puppies up for adoption she knows he’s been keeping an eye on online.
They’re on their way from the police station to the hospital when Jet says, abruptly, “He’s different, isn’t he.”
There’s no tone to it. It’s just a statement of fact - hot on Mars, isn’t it.
“Yeah,” she says, shrugging. It's true, but she still isn't quite sure how.
Jet rubs the back of his neck with his good hand and sighs.
“Looks stupid as hell in that hospital gown, too,” he says, shaking his head. “Man, when are we gonna get off this rock?”
“Yesterday would have been too late,” Faye says, and kicks at a stone.
-
Two more days ‘til they can get the hell out of dodge. Jet is off catching up with some old cop buddy and Faye blows all her money from the last bounty at the races and then visits the hospital alone, because there is nothing else for her to do, not in this entire damn galaxy.
She catches Spike in the process of climbing out of the hospital room window.
“This place is worse than prison,” he explains, straddling the windowsill.
She rolls her eyes, arms crossed, and mentally calculates their distance from the Bebop. Five minutes if they hurry, and then maybe she’ll never have to smell the old-soup stink of hospital corridors again in her life.
“I thought you wanted to stay,” she reminds him.
He climbs the rest of the way out the window and disappears. She follows him, dropping herself from the ledge onto a bed of red Martian dirt.
“You know, a two story drop is a really good way to reopen your stitches, genius,” she tells him when she lands.
He doesn’t look any worse for wear - looks better now than he has since it happened. Looks like himself, only moreso. He offers a hand out to her.
“I’ve come back from worse,” he says with a shrug, and pulls her up to standing.
-
They get back to the ship. Spike showers and Faye sits alone at the table with a bottle of beer and calls Jet a total of 13 times before it becomes clear that he’s not going to answer and that they’re not going to take off any time in the immediate future. Go figure.
Spike wanders in a little while later, finally out of that stupid looking hospital gown. He’s wearing his yellow shirt and what Faye knows are the only pair of pants he owns that aren’t caked in blood, and watching him walk to the refrigerator and start rifling through it like everything is okay again makes her feel grateful in a way she hasn’t been since she was someone else entirely.
“Hey,” he says, pulling out a bottle, “you guys bought booze.”
He knocks the cap off by hitting it against the countertop that way Jet hates, and then he climbs onto the couch from behind to sit beside her.
She offers her bottle out. He clinks it against his and they sit like that for a while in silence, drinking.
“Does it still hurt,” she says, picking at the label.
He turns to her, his expression between a smile and a grimace. “Like hell.”
She looks back at him for a moment, then she takes a bigger drink than she knows she ought to and puts the bottle down on the table.
“Spike -” she starts, and then doesn’t know how to say what she wants to, doesn’t even know where to start.
She turns to him, grabbing at his shirt with impatient hands, yanking at the buttons in the middle until it hangs open and she can see the clean white newly-applied bandages over his stomach.
Her heart is racing. Her hands are sweaty and cold.
“Faye,” Spike says, and he doesn’t even look surprised about her doing this. He puts a hand on her shoulder. “I’m alright.”
This is not the time for it, but there will never be a time for it and Faye is tired of waiting for something to jump-start her life. She grabs Spike by the neck and kisses him hard, painfully hard, and after a moment his hand creeps into her hair and she makes a sound, soft and surprised.
As much as it scares her, she’s never been equipped to deal with this whole new life alone. Neither is he.
They part. Faye puts her face in Spike’s shoulder, and he spreads a hand, light and then firm, across the small of her back.
“I know,” he says, lowly, reassuringly.
They sit that way for a while, close and quiet. Spike rubs circles onto her back and warms the back of her neck with his breath, and - why shouldn’t she get to have this for a little longer? She's got nothing but time.