Chapter Text
Remember. Who are you? She begins the memory with that question, the same that began Faye Valentine when she awoke just over three years ago and decided, furiously and definitively, she was going to be the answer. But who is she really? What is the real answer to that question? She can remember before her accident now but there are too many answers all at once. Layers upon layers of them.
She is lying in the dirt - no she isn't, she is in a room on the Bebop but it's also a long-abandoned lot on a long-ruined Earth and it's also a young girl's room (her room) with walls full of thumbtack holes and a stuffed monkey looking at her from a top shelf. She can't quite tell which is the now and which is the memory from last week or even sixty years ago because all of them are jostling around in here, defying the commonly agreed upon laws of time they are meant to be abiding by. She thinks of something Spike said (her insides flip over and over like the Slinky toy she once owned clambering down the stairs into her parents' hallway): it felt like I was seeing the past in one eye and the present in the other. Layers upon layers upon layers.
Concentrate. Who are you? Who are you in your truest form? She begins the memory with her videotape self because for months now that has been where she has been searching for answers. She is twelve in the tape. What year is this? The year before was the trip to China where she ate far too many watermelon flavor Popsicles and threw up right over the edge of the Great Wall. The year after would be when she discovered, right before the first day back at school, that she had started her period, peering at the evidence in the same detached way she watched crime scenes on the news. Twelve-year-old Faye now shuffles quite happily into view, although she is a little jittery; she is late for oboe practice (she will end up taking lessons for only a few more months before giving up because it is boring and classical and not like the instruments her favourite girl-band members play, i.e. cool). Her uniform is too big for her. Mother bought the wrong kind of socks and they keep wrinkling around her ankles (like, so annoying). Her eyebrows are terrible, like a poorly tended garden growing in all different directions, but there has been some attempt at mascara. Make-up is strictly forbidden at school but there is a fine art to applying it so it looks like you are not wearing any make-up and she hardly ever pokes herself in the eye with the applicator wand anymore. Maybe later she will find her friend Jenny and they can use Jenny's sparkly eye shadow and visit their favourite clothes store where Mrs Wong lets you try things on without buying them and take fashion show pictures in the dressing room. Although in addition to oboe she has to practice her English because her pronunciation is (direct quote from her most recent school report): 'riddled with error, despite her application of American slang being perhaps unparalleled in the class, suggesting an insatiable appetite for the consumption of Western media.' She does want to do well even though it is her worst subject alongside Arts and Crafts (which have nothing to do with applying make-up, worst luck). 'Heeey there!' she grins sloppily, in English, doing her best to sound like she could be a character on one of her beloved American sit-com shows. She waves and overhead a plane goes by, juddering like it is made of static - hang on.
Present Faye (Faye Valentine, or whoever she is) snaps back to her room. The real room, the Bebop one. It is entirely dark but for the bluish glow of the screen, the tiny plane fuzzing in the corner of it. She cannot tell how much of that was really memory and how much was just fanciful ideal.
Layers upon layers upon layers. She knows in the deepest roots of her heart that she was once this girl, that the aqua videotape sky had once arced beyond the frame of an old Betamax player into the corners of a real life world that had not yet fallen apart, a world that had been hers. But even knowing this, she feels no closer to this girl than when she had first seen her, without remembering, on the tape. She is still a stranger, trapped in the past. Or is it that Faye is trapped in the present, unable to get to her true self behind the glass?
This girl Faye doesn't seem trapped or frozen, the way she did before she was a real memory and was only a tape. Now she is more than pixels. But she is still not Faye Valentine, or even anywhere near her sphere. She is not flesh and blood. Instead she seems to be constructed entirely out of a kind of half-loping, half-bouncing childish joy that can exist only in the fantastical kingdom of girlhood. Long limbs folding awkwardly in and out of places. Shyness combining with noisy energy. Manifesting as something like the path of a children's party balloon which keeps bumping, gently, playfully, aimlessly, into things. It doesn't matter where she is going because though she has plenty of loved ones, she is also her own best friend. She isn't lonely even when she is alone, because inside her own mind there will seemingly always exist her familiar old world, a friendly hand in hers. This Faye has never known true betrayal or heartache and what it does to you - what it makes you do. Faye Valentine is the intruder, the faker. So why does she feel more real than this phantom child? She thinks about Dorothy in another old videotape, discovering the technicolor world of Oz, more fantastic than her own but ultimately alien and removed. It was just a dream.
For all of this existential poking, Faye feels more splintered and dissected, as if by her old adversary Dr Bacchus and his dreadful instruments, than joined together. Layers upon layers, but how can they co-exist? It was better, in the end, making up her own answers, but now they are all she has left and they have turned out to be this huge pack of lies. A terrible hand in a card game that not even Poker Alice herself could cheat her way out of. Look how deep the layers go.