Author's Notes: It's been a while since I posted anything. I had this in reserve, though I figured I might as well put it up. Hope you enjoy it.
Warnings: Language, angst, cigarettes.
Disclaimer: I do not own Cowboy Bebop or the characters used.
Six Deadbolts
It is night.
Well, it's always night in space, night and day, the in-between place, the great big birthing canal of life and dead and becoming. Some days you feel like an old man and others you gawk like a little boy.
I remember a time when I'd never seen so many stars, the day I first left home and chose to float out there without connections.
It's terribly lonely, but I do not dislike it.
Without my suffering, I don't believe I could be anyone else but me. If I wasn't holding dear that shriveled leftover of soul and my faintly beating heart of needles, I would be someone who had no right to have my life.
No one deserves my life, not even me.
I chose it, like a monk chooses to serve God. It was both destiny and occupation, something he planned since childhood.
It's so lonely here, at the time we deemed as night on this ship, floating some hundred miles from the gravitational pull of…wherever we were. My room is stark, simple, pipes lining the walls. I think this was once a large closet before Jet got to it, ripped it all out, remade it.
One bed, a futon really, screwed to the floor. One set of white sheets, one battered wool blanket, steel gray. One small light attached to the floor by the bed, one rug I glued to the floor to make it seem even a little more comfortable. One window by the low bed, as large and round as a pizza pie. One tiny chest for my things by the one steel door.
One cigarette pack by the bed. One cigarette in my hands as I sit curled on my bed watching outer space float by us as we float by it. It's lit, burning almost to my knuckles and I barely smoke it. The white, pungent smoke floats up in curls.
The only gravity we have on the ship is the floor. Anything touching it is held. If we jump, we can float for hours until we push ourselves back down again. Makes it tough to practice kicking, really. At first I'd nearly kicked myself in the head and ended up going over backwards.
There are six dead bolts on my door. I have a key for each one of them on a ring in my pocket, tucked in with one for the Bebop's excuse for a front door and a few others from another life. Once Jet asked me why I needed so many. I never bothered to answer and he never asked again.
No one ever wonders what Bounty Hunters do at night. One would suppose they slept, and yes, Faye does sleep. Actually, she snores. Ed and Ein take naps, then move, and nap again, interspersed with computer games or whatever else that girl gets up to. Once when I was up for a piss I caught her rather gleefully hacking into the police files of the criminally insane. I didn't bother asking about it, just hurried back to my room and counted my locks under my breath as I turned them.
Come to think of it, I've never seen Jet sleep. When he isn't working or cooking, he's with his bonsai trees…Maybe he just doesn't sleep. I know I don't. I wonder if he has nightmares, or remembers happy dreams from whatever life he had before he fell into this career. Did he have any happy dreams? Did any of them? Ed, certainly, but her idea of happy probably wouldn't correlate with anyone else's…she's still a kid after all.
I don't sleep well anymore. I never really did, even when I was young, but back then it was my belief in monsters that helped sleep could betray me. Now it is memory, surprisingly long after years of self-abuse and repression.
I remember him, I dream of him. He haunts me, like the great specter of actual night, there and not there, his sword in one hand, gun in the other, bird on his shoulder and grin on his face, sharp as any safety pin. I can see it in such detail, his eyes, his face, the scars, so many scars, inside and out.
Maybe I made a few of them up, who knows anymore?
Maybe he's dead…Oh God, don't think of that!
I never ever want him dead. His death is my death, the death of something greater within me, something that's kept me human through all my distasteful years.
Through childhood and awakening, through drugs and murder and abandonment, through the syndicate and through death, the thought of him held close enough could warm me inside out, even in the coldest weather, even out there with the stars where a man could be frozen in a second.
Did Faye once have someone she loved, a man she worshipped and adored and begged protection and equality from? Could Faye ever beg? Maybe not now, but then, back when she was a little girl on Earth? Would she even remember him now? Does she care?
Is she sad that he could be dead now?
I once worshipped a man, a man so dangerous and beautiful he may well have been cut from crystal, like an ancient knife. There was always something old about him, something traditional, something like in stories. Maybe it was the katana, but he seemed otherworldly.
I remember now that he dyed his hair. It was originally black as Jet's. He'd bleached it silver-white to make himself fearsome, like a warrior would on a great battlefield. I think he once fancied offhandedly that he'd like some Japanese armor to go with it, but it was only once, and we'd never had money enough for that. With the sword, we could barely make enough for the shitty apartment.
His bird always sang a nice song. I used to fall asleep to it, his hand on my back, front against front, face in shoulder, face in hair. He once said he liked the smell of my hair, though we used the same shampoo…Maybe he was just falling for a fit of romanticism, though he was hardly the typical subject. Once he left the bedroom, though, he was always stoic. It never slipped, not once in six years.
Wait…yes it did…
He'd snuck up on me cooking breakfast, I remember, grabbed me around the waist and kissed me on the ear. When I turned around to look at him in surprise, he was himself again…
Why had he done that? It wasn't so long ago really, just before Julia ruined everything.
Julia…that bitch…I hate her and I love her because she so goddamn pure and everything I want to be and wanted him to be…the perfect life, so close you could fuck it, but when you did, you just felt emptier until you were filled with nothing.
No organs, no blood, no internalized pain.
No guilt? Perhaps. Though now I feel the guilt…It was me who ruined everything, me and my stupid dreams of an ideal I could never attain. She was his plaything, not mine, and again I was greedy and stole it.
I understood why he wanted me dead. We were both striving for the same thing through her, things we could never have and we saw it in one another's eyes.
Without her arrival, we had a chance to be happy together, best friends, occasional lovers, partners and brothers. We had once been comfortable with our lives, so simple around one another. We trusted one another, knew one another so intently there was little need to speak.
I remember when I first got to the Bebop my amazement of how much I needed to speak to communicate with someone else. My life had been so driven toward him that when I had to, I barely knew the sound of my name from my throat. Jet says that I used to garble a lot then, sometimes in Cantonese and sometimes in English, to him and myself as if I'd never spoken a day in my life. He said that while I certainly knew what I was saying, he spent those first few months wondering if I was a bit retarded.
Out in this vast airless space, in my tiny airless cabin, something bitter explodes on the back of my tongue, contracts my throat, forces some glassy sensation in my eyes. It's cold in this room and I shiver, my cigarette burned to the filter, ash dropped on the blanket to leave the smell of burnt hair behind. I quickly drop it in the ashtray by my bed, an empty soda can with a screw cap on the top. I curl my knees to my chest and hold them there, shaking.
No one thinks about what I do, locked behind six dead bolts in my room. No one wonders about men I loved or women I fucked. No one cares if I sleep or jerk off or burn my blanket to ash or break my window for a quick death by getting sucked inside out.
No one cares if I cry.
I miss him. I remember once, just once, he cared enough to find me crying in my closet. I was twelve and frightened of my perceived monsters in the night. I remember once, just once, he helped me back to bed and held me close against him and told me all was well and it was fine to sleep, that he would hold them off for me.
That's why I need six deadbolts. Without him to hold those monsters back, I don't think I'd ever get any sleep.
Fin Six Deadbolts
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