Title: If You Might Have Kept Me
Fandom: Cowboy Bebop
Pairing: Spike/Faye
Rating: C
Notes: Bear in mind that I have only seen the series in its entirety once and that was several months prior to writing this, so small details may be wrong.  Also, Ed and Jet are around, because of *mumblevalidreasonmumble*.  Er, yes.  Title is from the Emiliana Torrini song "If You Go Away."

If You Might Have Kept Me

i.

He’s an unquiet ghost.

On some level that’s not surprising. He’d been an unquiet ghost before he — she can’t say “died.” Before he went away.

Jet’s told her things, and she’s done her homework. She’s got a pretty good idea. Not too good — he doesn’t like that. He’s like a cat with privacy and she tells him so. He laughs, the way he never did Before, and wafts through her hair because he knows it annoys her.

They tell her it’s just the breeze, but she doesn’t believe it.



ii.

Some nights she dreams of Julia. Oddly flat snapshots seen through one amber eye flicker like gunfire and roses litter the floor. She knows that these are not her dreams, but she doesn’t mind — after all, he doesn’t have a subconscious to dream with, and someone should remember the girl.

Other nights she gasps and moans and bucks against the mattress. Her fingers bury themselves in green hair and rangy thighs are hot between her own. She wakes, drenched and panting and alone, and gropes for her gun before remembering there’s no one to shoot. “You’re mean,” she breathes into the empty air, and “it’s better with a body, Johnny-Come-Lately.” It’s no use, and she can feel him smile against her, wicked and amused.

She should have killed him when she had the chance.

Less frequent are the still nights when he holds her and they don’t say a word. His lips move in a soundless paean against her hair, and he’s warm and skinny as ever and blessedly solid. It’s not bliss, but it’s as close as she’s ever come to it.

When she wakes she trembles for hours, and she knows from the way he hovers in the distance that he’s sorry. He’s explained and she understands, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less.



iii.

She’s got to remember to stop talking to him in public. Odd looks from strangers aren’t too much of a problem or even something terribly new to her, but once people see her doing it more than once they start to meddle. She wouldn’t mind jail, but the nuthouse is too much. The consequence is to stop talking as much in general, but she finds she rarely had anything to say before anyway.



iv.

Ed talks about him sometimes, when Faye visits, but Faye doesn’t think it’s the same. She knows it’s not precisely the same anyway — he’s a sick puppy but that’s too low even for him. Sometimes Faye wonders if Ed knows he’s de— what happened to him. Ed’s concept of time isn’t terribly linear — not that the Cryonic Woman has any right to cast stones — and “was” gets mixed up with “is,” but Ed’s got funny notions of Heaven and Faye thinks that if things aren’t the way Ed believes they are, they sure as hell ought to be.



v.

She’s given up trying to prove he’s there. “Look at that,” she’d say, as a wanted poster rustled in its own private breeze.

“The wind,” they say, and give her that look she’s starting to dread.

“There is no wind,” she insists. Sometimes she’s mad enough to wave her gun around as punctuation.

“The wind,” they say. And the conversation ends.

It’s not their fault. They didn’t know him. But hell, she didn’t either, not really.

But they didn’t love him, either, and maybe that’s the key.



vi.

She’s discovered that an invisible partner is great at the blackjack table. It’s twenty-one after twenty-one despite his reservations, and she knows she should quit like he keeps telling her, but she’s been hard up for too long to turn down money, and she’s not a cowgirl anymore.

The chips pile up and it almost doesn’t matter that the thrill is gone.



vii.

“I have to let you go,” she whispers, one night when dusk is falling purple around them.

No, he tells her, and she shivers at the brush against her neck.

She’s not going to cry. She’s never going to cry. “It’s not fair,” she protests, as if he doesn’t already know. Just because he lived in the past doesn’t mean she has to.

But he’s so lonely…

She doesn’t know enough about God to know what happened to him. What went wrong. If anything went wrong.

And she’s lonely too.

“I have to let you go,” she says again, and even she doesn’t believe it this time.



viii.

Her hair and clothes flutter. They tell her it’s just the breeze.

She doesn’t believe it.

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