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Glass shatters to the ground somewhere to Spike’s left. His body flinches, coiling up around his gun, but he doesn’t hear it—all he hears is a roar so familiar that it has a place inside his bones.
The Bebop’s engine. Halfway across the city, at the dock, the Bebop is taking off.
Spike breaks into a run. The mere existence of the street around him is nearly overwhelming, the light and sound crashing against his senses, like he spontaneously developed the beginnings of a migraine in the five minutes he spent inside. He doesn’t think about it. It doesn’t matter, nothing matters but getting there.
The Bebop hasn’t taken off yet, but the engines are humming loud and bright and Jet would never, Jet wouldn’t, if it was an emergency Jet would fucking call him first—
So that’s not Jet. So something’s happened to Jet, so Jet is—hurt, or incapacitated somehow, or, or—
So Spike runs. He puts his head down and runs, gun tucked close to his body, fingers going numb on the grip. A stitch tears through his ribs, turns his sprint into a stagger for a block before he can force himself to speed up again, breathing harshly through gritted teeth.
He can’t lose Jet. He can’t, he just can’t.
Miraculously, the Bebop is still at the dock when Spike reaches it, engines roaring. Spike cranes his head back to look through the windshield, trying to see who’s at the controls, and sees—
Jet?
Jet, sitting in the pilot’s seat, no one else in sight, no gun to his head. He doesn’t look scared, or pissed. Just… tired. Disappointed, the way he looks at Spike when Spike shoots to kill without thinking about it and they end up with no money for dinner.
Spike hunches over to catch his breath, rubbing at the stitch in his side.
When he looks up, Jet’s gone from the pilot’s chair.
Dread wells up in Spike’s stomach, like blood from a wound. He holds his gun against his chest. It’s the only comfort he has aside from Jet himself, the bare fact that Jet is still alive.
Something is wrong here.
Something is wrong. Something is wrong and there’s nothing Spike can do. Nothing he can do but hold his breath and hope that Jet’s alright.
The hangar doors judder open. Spike gasps for air.
It’s just Jet.
“That got your attention,” he says, low. “We need to talk.”
Spike can’t breathe. He can’t get the air into his lungs. His chest seizes, heaves, his throat works and his mouth gapes and he can’t breathe, he can’t.
There’s only one reason Jet would look at him like this.
Jet takes a step toward him. He has his gun in his hand, held down at his side. “It didn’t have to be like this, Spike. You could’ve told me the truth.”
The truth.
What is the truth? That the Syndicate plucked a nameless orphan off the streets and gave him the only life he’d ever known? That they made him into the kind of man that can kill without his hands shaking, the kind of man with so much blood under his nails that it’ll never wash clean? That ‘Spike Spiegel’ is a lie, has always been a lie, but so was ‘Fearless’, because Spike is so fucking scared of this, of exactly this—
“No hard feelings,” Jet says, his gun rising slowly, and this is worse than the anger Spike expected, when he imagined Jet finding out what Spike used to be, this is worse than being shot, this is worse than anything in the world. Jet looks sad, looks disappointed in him, and Spike can’t fucking breathe.
“Jet,” Spike gasps out.
“You can go, if you want,” Jet says, and Spike would fucking sob if he had the air in his lungs. “But something makes me think this’ll be easier for you.”
Spike goes to his knees. It hurts—jars through his kneecaps, down his shins and up his thighs in little sparks of sensation that only barely registers as pain. He puts his hands behind his head.
Jet just looks at him down the barrel of his gun. Spike’s vision is blurring but he doesn’t dare blink, doesn’t dare close his eyes, because even if Jet’s going to shoot him, Spike doesn’t want to miss a moment of it. Doesn’t want to sacrifice even a fraction of a second of looking at Jet.
He watches Jet’s face spasm with something like sorrow, then even out into a weary mask. He watches his finger tighten on the trigger.
Hurry up, Spike thinks. It hurts.
“It’s better like this,” Jet says, consolingly. He takes another step, then another, until he’s standing right in front of Spike, the gun nearly brushing his forehead. “Who you used to be… there’s no coming back from it. You know that. You’ll always be who you were with them.”
It’s true, Spike knows it’s true. It’s the worst thing he’s ever heard Jet say. He’s spent three years as a closed book sleeping with his shoes on so Jet wouldn’t say something like that to him, and now it’s all over.
He’s glad Jet’s going to shoot him. He doesn’t want to live like this.
The trigger clicks.
Spike jolts upright in the chair, yanking the goggles off his eyes. He staggers to his feet, clutches at his gun. Stares at the door. He still can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t, can’t, can’t live with this, can’t live like this, he can’t.
“Fucking mind games,” he breathes, but he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know if that was real and he’s dead, or if this is real, or if none of it ever was. If he died in the river when he tried to leave the Syndicate and all of this is just a dream.
He kicks the door open, steps out into the glaring sunlight. A headache sets up camp between his temples right away, but it matters the least out of anything.
Glass breaks. The door slams. None of it matters.
The Bebop’s engine roars in the distance.
Spike doesn’t run this time. He walks, slowly and deliberately, towards his execution. He keeps his shoulders back and his chin up, his face impassive, unburdened. It’s a long-practiced skill, from years standing at Vicious’ elbow. Standing steady, reliable. Calm where Vicious was anything but. Quiet, helpful, good.
He always ends up like this, somehow—he’s two for wretched, ruined two. Twice, now—he fought his way out of a place he couldn’t survive, found a man with enough empty space in his life to make it worth giving someone like him the time of day, weaseled his way into his life and tried to be good, tried to be what the man wanted, and it was never enough.
He’s never enough. Never enough to end up anywhere but on the wrong end of a gun held by the same hand that holds his heart.
Spike’s breath gets caught in his throat when he sees the Bebop. Gets caught and then snags, wrenching a wet, pathetic little gasp out of his throat.
He doesn’t need to wait for Jet’s absolution this time. He knows his role. He knows what happens next, what has to be done. He goes to his knees, like before, hands behind his head, at the foot of the docking ramp.
When Jet emerges, the same words as before already in his mouth, he stalls, gun halfway raised. He looks down at Spike with something terribly akin to a sad little smile on his face, and Spike can’t fucking breathe.
“It’s okay,” he tells Jet, fumbling his own gun up from where it’s holstered at the small of his back. He points it at the side of his head, finger quivering on the trigger. “I can do it, you don’t have to if you don’t want, I’ll take it off your hands.”
Jet steps forward. One, twice, then in broad, sweeping strides he closes the distance between them, the metal clanging of his boots on the ramp sending dull shocks of pain through Spike’s head. His hand curls around Spike’s wrist, and the press of metal fingers into his skin is absolution, is salvation, is everything. Spike’s chest swells with a sob that he refuses to let past his throat—he’s done enough to Jet without making this harder on him.
Slowly, Jet pulls Spike’s gun away from his head. Spike lets him. He’ll let Jet do anything to him. Leave him here, shoot him. If Jet told him to go find Vicious and let him do the honors of putting Spike down like a bad dog, he’d do it.
Jet’s hand—not the metal one still curled around his wrist, but the other, the one warm and bright with his pulse—wraps around Spike’s throat. There’s a tenderness to it—an intimacy, even—despite the deliberate pressure on his airway, the threat of suffocation driving Spike’s hands up to pry uselessly at Jet’s fingers.
Jet could snap Spike’s neck in a moment, with his other hand. This will take longer. A slower, sweeter torture, the loss of oxygen bleeding black spots across his vision, but not before he catches Jet’s eyes.
He looks tired. He looks sad, and tired, and not the slightest bit angry. Anger would be too easy, too volatile, too much like Vicious. Jet isn’t Vicious. Jet is wholly and completely himself, and it doesn’t matter if he’s angry or not. He’s still going to dispose of Spike, now that he’s realized what he is.
I’m sorry, Spike tries to say, but there’s no air left. His mouth works around the words. If Jet understands him, his expression doesn’t change. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I should have let you do this from the start. Spike’s mouth goes slack, the words pouring through his head with no outlet. You’re right, this is for the best, this is what’s meant to happen to me. It was always meant to happen. You’re right, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—
Darkness closes over his vision. Spike lets go.
All the screens in the Londes Center have been shot.
Deliberately, not in crossfire—they’re the only damage to the room. Recently, too—enough that the smell of gunsmoke still hangs in the air. And not by Spike—the bullet casings don’t match the caliber of his gun.
Someone else is here. Someone else after the bounty, maybe, or someone tailing Spike.
Anxiety starting to rise in the pit of his stomach, Jet draws his gun and advances down the hallway. Long, measured steps. His cop walk, Spike calls it, derisively. Habits die hard, Jet tends to snap back, and that usually shuts him up.
Jet’s easy to peg as a cop whether he’s walking or standing completely still, apparently, which Jet would not be bothered by, thank you, except for all the time it’s made bountyheads bolt, or shoot. But it’s like he says. Habits.
The double doors at the end of the hallway slide open when Jet approaches, and his train of thought careens neatly off the rails.
Spike is there, lying flat on his back in some kind of dentist’s-chair contraption, a cage of silvery arms over his body, terribly still.
There’s a man standing by his head, broad hands hovering over the data-goggles clamped around Spike’s head.
Jet is halfway across the room and has his gun to the man’s head before he can even think. This is why he hates sending Spike out on his own. He always ends up in some kind of trouble.
“Who the hell are you, and what are you doing to my partner?” Jet demands, all in one furious, terrified breath.
The man’s initial expression of panic collapses, crestfallen. “Your partner—I’m sorry, I really am, there was nothing I could do. He was gone almost as soon as I got here.”
Jet breathes. Low and steady, in through his nose and out through his mouth. His heart is pounding in his throat. His finger quivers on the trigger. “Explain.”
The man explains. The bountyhead that’s actually a rogue AI, the VR loop.
“He gave up his emotional tether,” he says, like that’s supposed to fucking mean anything. “The thing that, that matters most to him, that keeps him the most grounded in reality. The AI exploits that, puts pressure on it. When someone gives it up… the AI can detach their consciousness from their neural network and upload it. Like a spider trapping a fly in a web.”
Jet feels sick. “And he gave it up?”
The man nods. “Quicker than I’ve seen anyone go. Your partner… was he depressed?”
Spike, depressed? Jet’s first instinct is to scoff, because of course not, Spike wasn’t depressed. And then he thinks about it for longer than a fraction of a second, and it catches in his chest.
“Yeah,” the man says. “It’s… the thing we ended up calling Cy-Baba, at first, it went after people in fragile states. People that were easy to exploit. Londes works on the same principle. Your partner, he went under so quickly—”
“Is there any way to get him back?” Jet asks, his voice strangled taut in his throat.
The man hesitates. “He’s still hooked up. His body’s right there. If I shut Londes down, it might send his consciousness back into his body.” He pauses. “ Might ,” he repeats, hands held up placatingly as Jet whirls toward the bank of computers at the back of the room. “And I don’t know if I can even access the mainframe from here. Pulling the wrong wire might kill him.”
Jet grips his gun so tightly that his knuckles pale. Slowly, deliberately, he flicks the safety on and holsters it. “What can I do?”
The man smiles thinly. “I’ll let you know.”
Jet lets the man get back to work picking through the wires he’s unspooled from one of the wall-mounted computers. He paces, like a caged thing, circling the chair where Spike lies, unresponsive. Screens piled up in a great, uneven tower list off vital signs, biographical data.
“He’s still alive?” Jet asks, barely breathing, watching the steady pulse of Spike’s heart rate on the screen.
“It doesn’t matter whether he’s alive or not,” the man replies, voice muffled by the pliers he’s holding in his teeth. “He’s braindead. It has his consciousness uploaded. This only might—” the wire he’s holding sparks wildly, and the man flinches back with a curse, the pliers clattering to the floor as he shoves his burned finger in his mouth.
“Jesus!” Jet swears, starting towards him. “Are you alright?”
The man looks up, an apology writ large on his face. “I can’t shut it down from here. The only way to cut the power is from the mainframe itself.”
Jet’s heart beats so wildly he swears he can feel it bruising against his ribs. “Where’s the mainframe?”
“Earth,” the man replies. “And you have to hurry, this—” he gestures at the chair, “—isn’t life support, at some point his body’s going to recognize there’s nothing there and stop trying to keep him going.”
“Fucking Earth ?” Jet echoes, ignoring the rest, except for the urgency it lends to his step. He’s already moving, back to Spike’s side, swooping down to press his forehead against his, just for a moment, just in case he never sees him again. “Where on Earth?”
The man rattles off something that Jet processes but doesn’t really hear. He doesn’t wait for it to sink in, just snatches the single-connection handheld radio the man shoves into his palm and doesn’t wait for any more detail.
He runs. He clips the radio—cheap, walkie-talkie shit, its only redeeming factor being the sheer length of its transmission radius—to his belt and yanks his phone out of his pocket as he rushes back down the hallway, shoulder-slams the door open because it’s faster than using the handle, throws his leg over his bike.
Faye doesn’t pick up, because of course she doesn’t. The one time he really needs her.
He finds out why when he yanks open the door down to the engine room and finds her cuddled up on the floor with the mechanic. Both of them naked, covered only by a sheet, right there on the floor. In the fucking engine room.
“Fucking knock! ” Faye yelps, at Jet’s bewildered, instinctive what the fuck?
“It’s my fucking engine room!” Jet snaps back, and something in his voice makes Faye sit up, clutching the sheet to her chest.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, far too somber.
Jet thunks the replacement part down on the middle rung of the ladder. “Spike’s in trouble. Wheels up in two minutes.”
He leaves them to scramble back into their clothes, taking the stairs up to the pilot’s chair two at a time, already rushing to start the takeoff protocols as he drops into his seat.
He can’t lose Spike. He can’t. Not like this.
Mel’s warnings ring in his ears. Her derision grates. Jet hauls back on the throttle regardless, gritting his teeth as the Bebop fights him the whole way out of the water.
A coffin?
Well, then they’ll die together.
It’s a near thing. It’s a damn near thing. It’s a fight against the Bebop; him and Mel and Faye against the only home Jet has, trying her damndest to collapse under the strain they’re putting her under, for someone who might be dead.
It’s lodged in the back of Jet’s throat, that uncertainty. He might be tearing his ship apart for nothing. For a fragile string of hope. For a body with no soul.
For Spike. Always for Spike. Anything for Spike.
The pressure soars high enough to crack the gauge—the Bebop shudders under Jet’s hands and he wrestles them through the Gate and down into the atmosphere. Soars and drops again and Mel and Faye hold her together, as Jet grips the throttle so tightly his shoulders ache.
I’m never going to be forgiven for this , Jet thinks, incoherently. No matter how it ends . Whether Spike lives or dies, whether the Bebop burns up in Earth’s atmosphere or carries them safely to the planet’s surface, Jet’s going to regret this until there’s nothing left of him.
It feels like a microcosm of all his regrets—being too far away to prevent harm, too clumsy-handed to repair it, too late . A perfect representation of his terrible goddamn luck, like he’s a fault line in his own life, the weak point where the quakes of change erupt into violence.
Metal tears as the Bebop lands, her belly scraping across the rocky soil—it, too, split by endless earthquakes. Jet laughs in a moment of sheer relief and peels his fingers off the throttle to lay a hand on the dashboard, letting himself pause for just a fraction of a second, to regret treating her like this. He mutters an apology, too low for the comms to pick up, before he clambers from the chair and jumps the stairs, chin tucked like a sprinter.
The radio at his belt crackles, startling the shit out of him.
“His vitals are dropping,” the man warns him, his voice high and tight with concern. “Hurry!”
Like Jet wasn’t fucking hurrying already.
His navigation, at least, didn’t suffer like his ship—they’re close enough to the squat, ugly remains of the research facility that Jet decides it’ll take less time to get there on foot than drag his bike out of the hangar. He stops only long enough to grab a shotgun from the room that serves as their armory and sling it over his back.
Jet’s been here before—when the bounty on Cy-Baba first went live. He and Spike had picked their way through the recently-abandoned rooms, bickering the whole time about how they’d spend the bounty. He remembers, distantly, the way through the winding hallways.
He knows Faye and Mel are probably behind him, but he doesn’t look back for long enough to ensure it. He just runs.
“What do I have to do?” he asks, slowing down just slightly to thumb the radio’s transmit button.
“There should be a panel at the back of the mainframe. Cut the power, shoot it, it doesn’t matter. It’s not delicate, just shut it down.”
Faye speeds past him as he’s talking, the thud of her footsteps echoing down the empty hallway. He hears her cry of dismay before he sees why—the mainframe is sealed over, metal and solid plexiglass.
“Stand back!” Jet warns, his voice too loud in his own ears. He fires, empties a full clip into the glass and nothing, nothing , not even a crack—the stock of the shotgun breaks at the grip when he slams it against the barrier.
He resorts to beating his metal fist against the unforgiving glass, throwing his whole weight into it, until his shoulder screams at the treatment.
He can’t lose Spike. He can’t. He won’t , he refuses, he won’t let it happen. Maybe it’s too late—maybe Spike’s gone already, maybe Spike died quietly, in a VR loop of his worst fears, and there was nothing Jet could do—
(—and it will be Jet’s fault, he sent him there, sent him on a fool’s errand to get him off the ship, so he wouldn’t be stuck there moping while they were grounded, he should have gone with him, he should have known— )
A bloom of light eats up Jet’s vision, throwing him backward. He blinks at the remains of the mainframe through a haze of dark spots, ears ringing, dully uncomprehending for a moment, before Faye reaches down and hauls him to his feet with the hand not holding the rail gun.
“Still a scam,” Jet manages, his voice scraped raw in his throat. He clutches her hand, clutches the radio at his belt. “Talk to me.”
Silence. For far too long. Then a crackle of static, and—
“He’s alive. He doesn’t look great, but he’s alive. He’ll be okay.”
Jet shouts wildly, breaks into heaving gasps of laughter. Faye shrieks, and when Jet reaches for her, throws her arms around his neck.
“He’s alive,” Faye gasps, and Jet shakes with it, still laughing, his eyes wet, trembling with the dissipating adrenaline.
That’s all that matters. All that’s ever mattered. And maybe Jet should worry about that, about how much of his life is wrapped up in Spike, a man who flirts with death like he’s gunning for a hookup with the Grim Reaper, but it doesn’t matter. This time, Spike’s alive.
Spike is almost certain that he’s dead.
He’s dead, or he should be dead, or he will be dead soon. Or all three. They’re not quite mutually exclusive.
His head is pounding. The lights are blinding—someone’s speaking to him (why is someone else here?) and he can’t hear a word, just the hammer of noise against his temples.
He feels sick. He is sick. He’s sick in the head, a weapon of the Syndicate, that’s why Jet had to put him down. Has to? Had to? Has it happened already? A bullet wound would explain his headache, but not why he’s still experiencing the misfortune of being alive.
Future tense, then—Jet’s going to kill him. If Spike doesn’t go to him, chase the noise of the Bebop’s engines, Jet will certainly come to him, shoot him or strangle him, make it all go away.
Why can’t he hurry it up?
Spike toys with the safety of his gun. Someone, the person, the person who isn’t Jet but for some reason is here, touches his wrist, and Spike lashes out blindly, shoving him away. The thud of his body against the floor sends another wave of pain through Spike’s head. Moving at all is making him nauseous.
Jet’s going to kill him. Jet’s going to find him here and he’s going to gun him down like Spike’s just another Syndicate goon and Spike will deserve it.
He should have told Jet the truth when they met. He should have died then—it would be better for everyone. Better for Jet and Faye, better for Spike. ‘Spike’ would never have needed to exist in the first place, if only Fearless had died like he was supposed to.
Spike clutches his stomach and slides his legs off the side of the chair. Standing up is out of the fucking question, so he just lets himself crumple off the edge, curling up on the floor in a mess of limbs fuzzing with pins and needles. The light hurts. His skin hurts. His teeth and his eyes and his hair and his fingernails hurt.
Jet needs to fucking hurry.
Spike doesn’t know how long it takes. He doesn’t know how long he sits there, trying to shield his eyes from the light, trying not to think too hard about the weight of his gun against the base of his spine, trying to ignore the fucking stranger in the room. Maybe it’s Londes. Maybe Spike should shoot him. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything. He just knows that it hurts.
Finally, the doors slide open, and Jet is there.
Despite everything, because of everything, Spike’s happy to see him. He lifts his head into the burning light and tries to smile. He can’t open his mouth or he’s going to be sick, or maybe just scream, so he can’t tell Jet that it’s okay, he’s ready, he can go ahead. Hopefully the smile will be forgiveness enough.
But Jet doesn’t shoot him. He comes closer, kneeling down beside Spike. He’s talking, the words just jarring, painful noise. They’re probably the same words as before, it doesn’t matter.
Spike tilts his head back, bares his throat. He wishes Jet would just shoot him and make it quick, but this is okay too.
Instead of wrapping around his throat, though, Jet’s arms close around him. Spike goes stiff, tries to flinch away, but Jet gathers him against his chest, cradles him there like he’s holding his daughter, and Spike’s throat closes.
This isn’t right. This isn’t how it goes, this isn’t how it went—it’s not supposed to be this gentle, it’s not supposed to take this long. Jet’s not supposed to be this careful with him.
Then Jet stands, slow and deliberate, with Spike tucked against his chest, carrying him towards the door, and Spike has to slam his eyes shut against the white-hot shards of pain digging into his brain through his eyes but this isn’t right—
Spike thinks of all the ways someone can die, all the ways an incapacitated body can be neatly disposed of and never found, thinks of drowning, thinks of starving, thinks of confined spaces and garotte wires, thinks of falling, thinks of depressurization.
That would be… nice, almost. He’s fantasized about airlocking himself a time or two, on nights when he can’t close his eyes without a sourceless panic wrenching them back open, when the night terrors keep their teeth even with the lights on. Dying in space would be quick. Abrupt asphyxiation. Near enough to painless—one terrible rush of sensation as his bodywater began to vaporize and then nothing, nothing, nothing.
It’s the best he can hope for.
Spike either passes out or just stops responding by the time Jet is out the door of the Londes Center. His limbs fall loose, his face a mask of pain and disorientation. It makes Jet feel cold inside, like taking a breath of frigid air.
It also makes getting him home a struggle and a half, since Jet can’t exactly just prop him up on his bike and drive like that. It’s not too long of a walk home, but that leaves the problem of the bike itself.
He ends up calling Faye, who picks up this time, thankfully, though apparently he interrupted something more interesting, because she complains at length about him always needing something from her, and how did the two of them survive for so long without her, but she—and Mel, who’s still on the ship, cleaning up the mess of Jet’s forced takeoff despite knowing how empty Jet’s pockets are—agree to come pick up the bike when they’re not busy.
‘Busy.’ Well, at least Mel’s getting something out of this mess.
Jet carries Spike back to the Bebop. In half an hour, he barely moves, except for the occasional twitch of a limb, or some half-formed effort to hide his face against Jet. He doesn’t wake up, not until Jet gets him all the way home and deposits him on the couch, at which point he jolts into a flurry of limbs, then just as quickly curls into a knot of pain.
Jet leaves him there and goes to find the bottle of aspirin.
When he returns, Spike is upright, squinting at Jet. He takes the bottle when Jet offers it, turning it over in his hand like he doesn’t recognize it. After a moment of flinching at the quiet rattle of pills, he looks up at Jet again.
“When are you going to kill me?”
When Jet was young, just shy of twenty-one, fresh out of the ISSP Academy, he was shot in the chest on a routine stakeout of a street corner popular with drug dealers. He’d been wearing a bulletproof vest at the time, but the impact had knocked all the air out of his lungs, left him gasping and certain, for a moment, that he was dying.
This feels like that. Just like it, arguably even worse.
“Why the fuck would I do that?” Jet asks, the words strangled out of his throat.
Spike just stares at him in abject confusion. Jet stares back for a moment, before realization slams into him with the force of a zipcraft.
He was Spike’s emotional tether. Something about him, about their relationship, was the most exploitable thing in Spike’s subconscious. He’d been what Spike had given up so readily, what Spike had nearly died for. Had died for. And the conceit of the loop had been… Jet killing him?
The breath rushes out of Jet’s lungs all at once. The guilt is staggering, dazzlingly blinding as an eyeful of sunshine after weeks out in space. Jet has to fold his arms around his stomach and grip the fabric of his flightsuit to weather it, struggling to start breathing again.
“Jet?” Spike says, in a terribly small voice. “Could you just… please. I know, I know what I—I understand. You’re right. It’s okay. I promise it’s okay, just—get on with it.”
Jet feels ill. He reaches out, stomach churning at Spike’s flinch, and touches the back of his hand.
“Jet,” Spike repeats. His eyes are wet. His voice fractures. “Please.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Jet insists, feeling the tension in the tendons of Spike’s hand, hating it, hating whatever it is in him that makes Spike think he could ever, would ever. “I’m not going to kill you. It’s not going to happen. Whatever you saw in there, it’s not real. I’m not going to do that to you. You’re my partner.”
Spike looks between Jet’s hand and his face, his expression so blankly shocked that it would be funny if this weren’t so fucking awful.
“This is real?” he asks, barely louder than a breath.
“Yeah,” Jet rasps, his heart in his throat. He turns Spike’s hand over and laces their fingers together, squeezing as tightly as he dares.
Spike’s face crumples. For a moment, he’s utterly still, eyes squeezed shut, his bottom lip caught between his teeth, so pale under the pressure that it must be painful. His shoulders quiver as he draws in a breath.
Abruptly, he folds forward, shaking, his hand wrenching free from Jet’s as he wraps his arms around himself. His breath comes in sharp spasms of noise, just shy of sobbing. He bends so low against the couch that his forehead presses against Jet’s thigh.
Jet reaches out before he can even think, catching Spike by his trembling shoulders and tugging him closer. It’s a clumsy, half-desperate maneuver—some guilty need to comfort what he’s caused.
Spike doesn’t rise from where he’s curled into himself, but he shifts at Jet’s urging, and ends up halfway on his lap, his face pressed into Jet’s stomach, Jet’s arms wrapped around his shoulders, bearing his weight. Jet thinks distantly, dizzily, of the sling he would carry Kimmie in, in the few scant months he spent with her after she was born, before the case came down on his head and he was shipped to Pluto to serve his sentence. The whole weight of a body against his, weeping.
One of Spike’s arms unwinds from around himself, his hand rising to latch onto the fabric of Jet’s flightsuit, his grip hesitant, only tightening when a sob wrenches through him, curling his whole body further into Jet’s embrace.
Jet barely breathes. He holds Spike close—it’s the only thing he can do, the only possibility afforded to him. Spike’s whole weight rests in his arms. Jet couldn’t let him go. There could be a gun to his head, and he’d still hold on.
He doesn’t know how long it takes for Spike to cry himself out, until the slump of his body is unconsciousness rather than grief. Even then, Jet lifts him delicately, at the small chance he’s still awake, just exhausted. His eyes stay closed, though—his limbs loose and unresponsive when Jet lays him out on the couch.
Helplessness closes over Jet’s limbs, icy and terrible. He crouches beside the couch for a long moment, his knees and ankles aching at the unnatural position, trying to convince himself to move, to do anything at all but look blankly at Spike’s face, like he might better understand any of this by watching the tracks of Spike’s tears beginning to dry on his skin.
Eventually, the frigid paralysis fades. Jet straightens up. He lifts Spike by the shoulder and slips a pillow under his head. Spike doesn’t even stir.
Jet’s hands itch. He turns away from the couch, paces towards the kitchen.
Spike will be hungry when he wakes up. Jet can solve for that. Nothing else—but that, he can do.
“Why would I ever—” Jet says, then cuts himself off with a heavy sigh, dropping his chopsticks into his half-empty bowl.
Spike’s been awake for fifteen minutes. Jet’s explained, stiltedly, staring at the floor, the five minute version of what happened. Spike’s head feels like someone set off a grenade behind his eyes. He took three aspirin and he’s still waiting for them to put a dent in the pain. He’s forcing himself to put mouthfuls of stir-fry in his mouth even though the inside of his mouth tastes so strongly and unpleasantly metallic, the exact metal-flavor somewhere between iron and copper, that he can’t taste anything else.
“What?” he asks, when his pain-addled brain finally gets around to processing the movement of Jet’s mouth.
“Why would I ever kill you?” Jet finishes, after a long moment of staring at the wall with his brows drawn together into a frown that Spike usually only sees when he’s fucked up somehow—killed a bountyhead, or damaged the ship, or damaged himself. It makes him a little nervous, honestly.
Spike considers answering—considers honesty. The truth hovers in his mouth, coats the back of his throat, pushes incessantly at his teeth. He curls his tongue back to press at his soft palette, as though he can dislodge it.
He remembers Jet’s gun brushing his forehead, Jet’s fingers wrapped around his throat. Jet’s voice, steady and calm, more tired than angry, assuring Spike that this is for the best.
That wasn’t Jet. Spike’s vaguely aware of that—as tentative as his grasp of reality sometimes slips, he knows that wasn’t Jet because Jet doesn’t know.
“I don’t remember,” Spike says, at length. “It’s all… fuzzy. Incoherent, in retrospect. Like a dream. I’m sure it was very convincing at the time.”
Jet’s eyes are shut. He looks like he’s in pain. “Why would you let me?”
That, Spike can answer. “If it came down to it, I wouldn’t defend myself against you. I wouldn’t be able to hurt you.”
The pained look just gets worse. Spike shuts his eyes, too, so he doesn’t have to see it. Blindly, he slides his bowl onto the tabletop. The chopsticks clatter to the floor, the noise jarring Spike into a flinch.
“Would you turn out the lights?”
Jet gets up and turns out the lights. He sits down next to Spike on the couch. After a moment, his hand curls around Spike’s, lacing their fingers together.
They sit together in the dark for a long time.