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Jet watches the clock on the Bebop’s dashboard.
It used to be a nice piece of tech, satellite-based—adjusting automatically to local time. Now that feature’s broken, and they’ve never managed to save up enough for it to be worth fixing, so it just shows any old time.
Any old time is enough—Jet just needs to see time pass.
It’s an agonizing half hour. Long enough for Spike to get to Mars and do what he has to do, not long enough for—
Jet shoves away that train of thought, watching another minute tick past.
Footsteps in the hallway; the click- thunk of Faye’s bootheels as she storms past almost covering up the way she’s still sniffling.
The clock ticks over again. Jet swallows hard, trying to get his heart out of his throat.
The footsteps stop, then draw closer to the door. Not stomping this time—gentle-like, as though she’s trying not to startle Jet.
Jet doesn’t turn away from the clock, but he cuts his eyes toward the door, just briefly, so she knows that he knows she’s there.
“What are you doing?” Faye asks. Her voice is rough, faintly unsteady. Damp, vulnerable , in a way Jet has never heard her. It’s uncomfortable. Disorienting. She’s not supposed to be like this. It’s all wrong, it's all so wrong.
Spike was supposed to say goodbye—
“We can’t let them have his body,” Jet says. It comes out dull as old metal, as if from a distance—as if he’s far from this, uninvolved. “They’ll hang it up somewhere as a warning, he’d hate that. But if we start after him too soon we’ll get blown out of the sky.”
Silence, except for Faye’s boots scuffing against the floor, the raggedy noise of her breathing. Then: “He’d hate that, too.”
Grief closes Jet’s throat, stings hot and sharp behind his nose, floods his eyes with tears. He lets himself slump forward, just for a moment, forehead resting against the controls.
“Jet…” Faye begins, all uncertainty and sorrow, but she doesn’t say anything else. There aren’t any words for this. There never will be.
“I have some money set aside,” Jet says, when he can breathe again. This time, his voice comes out clogged, barely steady. “Emergency funds.”
Funeral funds. It’s in a locked account on Ganymede, so Jet can’t use it for anything else. He never expected to need it, not until Spike. And even then—not until recently. Not until Vicious, and the chaos within the Syndicates, and Spike rushing off half-cocked as usual, but with his eyes dark with intent and far away, that muffled death-wish under his skin rearing its ugly head.
“I think this was a long time coming,” Faye says. She sniffs hard, scrubbing at her nose and eyes with the heel of one hand. The other still holds her gun, white-knuckled. “I always got the sense he was just… waiting for the next stop.”
Jet tries his damndest to find his composure. He wipes the tears from his eyes, makes himself swallow hard, breathe deep and slow until he can speak again.
“Yeah,” he tries. His voice cracks, and he lets it. Ignores the heat in his face, the wet streaks on the bridge of his nose. Sits up. “I know.”
He’d damn well better know—he knows Spike better than anyone does, knows him as well as he knows himself. Knows him like his own hands, curled around the Bebop’s controls.
He doesn’t look at the clock, or at Faye. He knows he’s stalled long enough.
It’s time to face the music.
Time to bring Spike home.