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Spike bumps into Faye as she’s leaving the toilet, head bowed and chin tucked into her chest. The corridor is pitch-dark as it always is when the Bebop is drifting in space, so the only light comes from the glow spilling out through the open toilet door. And Faye is crying.
“Hey,” Spike says cautiously, like she might go at him just for catching her like this—as if it’s his fault for walking through here at the wrong time. “What’s up?”
Faye doesn’t look up to meet his eyes. Her shoulders have drooped and her hair falls around the frame of her face, like curtains drawn to cover it. She lets out a sigh and shakes her head.
Spike lifts a hand to knead at the back of his neck. The silence is growing more strained as the seconds go by, and Faye is still standing here for some reason, and out of an unknowable guilt Spike can’t bring himself to leave either.
“Uh,” he tries again, for want of something to fill the air with, “are you okay?”
Spike regrets the words as soon as they’ve tumbled out of his mouth, graceless and hollow-sounding. It’s a stupid question, because of course she’s not. And because he doesn’t actually want to know—he’s never cared to before, but not asking felt like the worse option.
Faye finally lifts her head at that and grimaces. Her eyes are red-rimmed, almost delicate in a way. Spike braces himself for the worst.
“Fine and dandy, cowboy,” she says in a voice so soft it doesn’t sound like hers. “Just going to get a snack.”
Faye doesn’t move to go just yet, staying rooted to the steel floor. Her eyes are downcast and she’s wringing her hands fervently, like she’s waiting for something. The sight feels too close to comfort for Spike, who knows nothing beyond the con woman in her—other than the fact that she treats the Bebop like a cheap bed and breakfast, and she likes gambling away hard-earned Woolongs almost as much as he likes smoking.
And her eyes are green the way Earth was before the Astral Gate incident broke it to pieces; back when it was whole and beautiful as the pictures make it out to be.
It strikes him then that he knows a little more now—though not by choice—and it’s that standing before him isn’t Faye the con woman with no last name, but Faye whose last name has been lost to her, along with the rest of her on the Betamax. Spike takes a good look at her and sees the same sudden vulnerability that he’d seen on the tape, something Faye Valentine has never worn since she’d swindled him and Jet on Mars. At once Spike sees Faye in the dawning of her twenties and at the vestige of her seventies, too young for this stupid world but also late beyond her years.
It’s funny, Spike thinks, that they both have something in common after all—their ghosts, hanging over them; his lucid as the strip of light in this dingy corridor, and hers as pitch-black and empty as the view out the window.
He must’ve been staring pretty hard, because Faye frowns and says, “Quit looking at me like that, you lunkhead. I’m fine. I can take care of myself, you know.”
Spike finds himself smiling fondly back at her. “I know.”
“Well, good.”
Faye finally turns on her heels and marches down the corridor toward the galley, and Spike trails along after her. He reaches into his pocket for a cigarette and lights it, just to keep his hands busy.