Bad: Prologue

"I wish love, lord
I wish love could live forever
I'm burning bright as hell
Here comes that weird chill"

– Mark Lanegan

It was hard to know where to begin again. The tide had turned, the rip current had pulled him out to sea. Nature laughed at his imminent doom, and it echoed hauntingly off the waves that threatened to steal his life, yet…

And maybe that was the reason itself. Even in taking responsibility for his bad deeds, his reckless existence, accepting that he'd placed himself here where he was to die and charging in headfirst, maybe part of him had to get in that final "fuck you" to the idea that any of this was inevitable or meant to be. That had to be the reason, he guessed.

It was Spike's first night back in his old bed, and even though it still felt like lying on a slab of concrete, he was in love with it. Anything was better than that hospital bed. He thought about Mad Pierrot. Staring down the barrel of that gun, about to piss his pants, he knew he did not want to die. He fought and he ran. How much of that had been his choice, he wasn't sure. The human body did whatever it needed to do to survive.

Now he was tired, he was in pain, his heart ached with loss, but fuck if he wasn't free.

It had been over two months. Despite his internal scoffs at the notion in the past, this goddamn bucket of bolts really was his home. He felt the both the relaxing familiarity and indefinable malaise deep in his bones.

The bed was great, but he couldn't sleep. He sat up, and it hurt. He wondered if it would always hurt. He was older now, and wounds like these were hard to recover from. He didn't want to think about it too much so he didn't. But he felt the hurt all over, in every part of him.

He sat for awhile and stared at the floor. He heard the whisper of footsteps go past his door. It seemed he wasn't the only one having trouble sleeping. He heard her coming and going, gliding barefoot along the metal floors all night long.

He lay back down and felt bored and tired. He'd never been too good at this stuff.

After she had slipped through his grasp on Calypso, Spike, unbeknownst to himself, had accepted that Julia really was gone and that he was never going to see her again. When he saw her standing there in the graveyard that day he felt anxiety, not joy or excitement. It felt more like his sign that the chickens had finally come home to roost, and he knew everything in his life now would go to pieces.

He'd been afraid then. Afraid for Julia, for Jet, for Faye. It was all going to go to pieces. Seeing her die, lying there in his arms, it felt like theatre. Julia was already dead, and he had already mourned her.

After awhile he heard sobbing through the wall. He rolled onto his side and hugged his pillow. Here he was trying to figure out how to properly mourn one woman and this girl was mourning every person she'd ever known. Spike had yet to actually see Faye since he left the Bebop two months ago. She had never come to the hospital, and she had been out when Jet brought him home today.

He didn't mind. If it had been this long by her doing, he knew when he did see her it probably wouldn't be pleasant. Spike didn't really believe in awkward encounters—he usually just barreled through them, but Faye had a way of letting you know just how she felt, even if she had to scream it.

Jet was pissed at him, too. Jet understood things that Faye didn't, understood a man's duty, and even though he was pissed, Spike knew he had no plans of mentioning it. But Spike knew Jet had done something, used some part of his arsenal to get him out of trouble with the ISSP—temporarily, anyway. Whatever it was must have been serious, because it wasn't fitting in with Jet's code.

Swell.

He hated hearing this sobbing. It was becoming unbearable. He couldn't seem to tune it out, and he felt something inside his chest constrict at the sound. It made him feel like a jackass for all the times he'd treated her callously, like she didn't have real feelings, because now he had undeniable proof that it wasn't true. Well, he'd known before now, but it always seemed more convenient to ignore it than acknowledge it. But there was no ignoring this.

There was no ignoring any of this anymore.

He felt a warm tear slide over the bridge of his nose. He didn't know who exactly it was for…Jet, Faye, Julia…hell, it could have even been for the kid and dog. He'd never been too good at this stuff.