Friendly Fire

Friendly Fire

"Shit!" Jet sworn as he vaulted over the bullet-riddled retaining wall that had safely separated him from the foggy seashore where Spike had been engaged in hand-to-hand combat with several dark suited mafia members.

"What the fuck was that?" Faye screeched, hot on his heels as they both raced towards the heap of bodies being gently tossed by the waves.

A cough came from the pile of limbs ahead of them and Spike surged upright out of the mess with one hand gripped tightly around his left upper arm. "Fucking friendly fire, Jet?" He rasped, glaring at the ex-cop.

Hastening to get to his partner's side, Jet scowled as he started to help the other man to dry land. "Look, between the fog and how much your suit looks like theirs thanks to the water... well hell, be lucky I only grazed you."

"Gonna make me be the one to haul the rest of these assholes out of the ocean here?" Faye grumbled.

Spike winced at the salty spray that managed to get past his white-knuckled grip on the oozing bullet wound. "I ain't about to bust my ass with all that." He muttered. "Leave me be, Jet. The bounty is more important. Dead OR alive was the stipulation, right?"

"For his sake I fucking hope so." Faye muttered as Jet waded out to help her. She glanced up at Spike and a worried look crossed her face.

Spike frowned back at her. "It's just a flesh wound, Faye. I've done worse to myself." He didn't want Jet getting all weird and angsty about something that wasn't really his fault - or at least, wasn't intentional on his part. The older man tended to hold himself to high standards and Spike was concerned that guilt would make him act weird and beat himself up.

"Yeah?" She mumbled, abandoning her halfhearted attempt at dragging a corpse from the surf to instead slog over to where Spike was standing hunched over on the thin strip of sand between the waves and the retaining wall that sheltered the spit of land on the other side. "Just gonna try to hide that one then or what?" She gestured curtly towards his abdomen with a furtive glance back at Jet struggling with three bodies at once.

Spike coughed again and couldn't hide the spasm or the bloody phlegm that he spat into the seawater.

Faye's worried look grew more intense, color washing from her already pale features. "Spike..."

"Leaving me to haul them all out myself?" Jet called up to them. "The water does half the job for you, Faye!"

"Priorities, Jet." She snapped back, reaching out to tug at Spike's clothes. "Got something to take care of here. I'll send Bob your way but I'm gonna bring this lunkhead back to the ship."

"For a graze?!" Jet's voice was incredulous.

"S'hard to fly one-armed." Spike offered as an excuse. His body was beginning to go into shock and he knew he didn't have much time before his condition was obvious to Jet. He was fortunate that the ex-cop was preoccupied with trying to get all the mob men rounded up before the ocean swept them out beyond reach. Faye gave up on checking his other, more critical wound, when he glared at her. She rolled her eyes and gave him a gentle push to get him moving. His body automatically began to take steps in the direction she had shoved him, accustomed to operating on basic instructions when he was truthfully too hurt to be in motion at all. The cold seawater was an agony of its own that somehow burned in a different way than the edges of the raw entry point of the bullet... the fact that he couldn't feel a corresponding injury on his back was disconcerting. Faye was nowhere near qualified to dig around for a missing bullet. Dammit. Either he'd have to reach out to Doc or let Jet know he'd been clipped worse than originally thought.

His shoes hit against the base of the retaining wall, which was only about four feet high, but he knew it was going to be nearly impossible to pull himself up and over the stack of concrete bricks.

"Faye..."

She gave him a hard look. "What do you need?"

"Gotta tell Jet... can't..."

"About damn time you saw sense."

Pain was blurring the edges of his vision. Unconsciousness was coming to claim him quicker than he'd expected.

"JET! Forget them for now! We've got a situation here!" Faye bellowed, the volume of her voice making Spike's ears ring.

His gut was a maelstrom of hurt. Trying to walk it off had no doubt exacerbated the issue. Having a waterlogged bullet wound wasn't exactly helpful either.

Mercifully, Spike sagged into Faye's arms and passed out before Jet arrived at their side. He didn't want to go into that great beyond with the guilt-ridden stare of his partner as the last thing he saw...

Sleep...

What a curious thing it was.

Necessary to recharge the human body yet fraught with dangers. It was a time of complete vulnerability... Removed from awareness of the world in which you dwelt, unable to defend against assault in that external realm yet also at risk from internal attack in the form of nightmares and sleep paralysis and other nocturnal terrors.

He loathed it. Dreaded it. Sought to rise above the need his body had for it.

But he also longed for it. The escape from the walls of his prison. The chance to see him again... to let memory coalesce into reality if only in the world of dreams...

And despite his warring emotions on the matter... regardless of how his frail human body required that unconscious shutdown...

He could not sleep. It evaded him. It eluded him. It refused him.

Days became weeks became months.

They plied him with drugs. Medications to reorder his synapses. Trial runs of this product, test batches of that... Concoctions created to tap into his neurotransmitters...

Guesswork, they admitted. Throwing possible antidotes to his issue at the proverbial wall to see what may stick.

He was drowning in medications. Desperate for the most debilitating ones. Jonesing for the injections that let him turn off his brain, that enabled him to briefly forget the silver-haired specter that haunted him constantly. Why would he have betrayed him? Lied to the courts and cast him to the wolves?

In his heart of hearts he knew the awful truth. But it was so much easier to simply go mad. His savior in the trenches could not be his downfall once they were free - it was nonsensical. The man he trusted so deeply, the man who had been so intimately a part of his life...

Better to avoid the weakness of sleep, where dreams would tease him and nightmares would force him to acknowledge the truth. Better to drive himself out of his own skull through sheer lack of rest. Better to succumb to the void through whatever combination of drugs cast him into a stupor.

And so he was an unwilling test subject ... though those institutionalized had little say over their own autonomy.

And so the shadow Vicious threw over his life grew larger and darker still.

You Still Don't Get It

"He's not like anyone else..."

The words haunted him. The images haunted him too. Yellowed scraps of someone's entire life, pictures of innocence... a life twisted into disaster. A military criminal, a felon, a person connected to whoever Julia was... a commonplace name that had sent Spike spiraling. Well, at least he could extend an olive branch to his erstwhile partner. And then tow this childlike adult woman back to the ship. Between the two of them he wasn't sure who was the most emotionally immature...

He often struggled with figuring out what made Spike tick but he'd never really understood women either. Here at least was a chance to try and see what led Faye to run off in a teenage strop. Why had she left the note? Why leave them any way of chasing her down?

Naturally Faye avoided explaining herself.

Her query in response was simple enough to answer (if he kept it on the up-and-up, choosing to focus on a minute detail instead of the way his heart had involuntarily clenched with concern once he realized where she'd fled) ... and when she brought up the sum left in the safe he had to try and play off that he hadn't known how much was there.

Her interest in Julia made his heart stutter and close itself off. Of course. Spike was the more handsome of them. More fun, more exciting. Made sense that a wildcard like Faye would be drawn to another daredevil instead of someone as stolid as Jet himself.

But what of Gren?

That troubled him. Finding her cuffed to another man's bed, that troubled him. The way she shrugged it off yet seemed so... touched. What sort of a hold could a near-stranger have on her already? What sort of person was this Gren who had somehow gotten tied up into the lives of two different crew mates whose paths were so different?

A question for a question, surely he deserved some answers.

"So, who is this Gren?"

A chuckle over the COMM. "You still don't get it." Faye didn't sound bothered by his asking. Amused, yes. Even maybe a bit interested. She seemed in better spirits than the depression he'd noticed as he released her from the cuffs and reached out to update Spike.

A sigh.

"He reminded me of you, if I'm being honest..." Her tone was thoughtful, soft. "Honorable fools, taking in strays... risking a bite to the hand that feeds..." Her voice trailed off into a series of coughs.

Grimacing at her opinion of him as much as at the sickly sounds she was making, Jet exhaled heavily. "Never mind. Shut your mouth, conserve your strength."

Self-Destruction

Usually it didn't bother him.

Life was shit. You did what you had to do to make it from day to day.

Sure, maybe he made some regrettable choices. Got tied into some piss-poor alliances. Set himself on a path of self-destruction.

The blood on his hands wasn't the blood of innocents. That was about all he had going for himself when he got into one of his dark moods. And it's not like he felt much remorse over the people he'd killed over the years, whether as a syndicate lackey or as a bounty hunter. Pretty much anyone he put a bullet or knife into (or beat down or blew up) had it coming to them.

Even so, he knew he wasn't a good man.

Faye would roll her eyes and remind him that nobody was good. (and then Ed would cartwheel by and Faye would grimace and Spike would raise his eyebrows like "you see? your argument is false." And Faye would throw her hands in the air and walk away because she had nothing else up her sleeve to deter his line of reasoning)

Jet would wax philosophical and Spike would tune it out because he was never high enough to hear all that and anyway he'd read books on Buddha and souls and all that jazz and none of it resonated enough to save him.

So he'd mope around the ship feeling like a shadow of a human, merely existing, and then some dangerous bounty head would be on the market and he'd take insane risks and maybe someone tough enough would mop the floor with him and he'd wind up on the couch in a state of drug addled pain filled misery that he knew he deserved.

Yeah, he was self-destructive. By force and by choice.

Getting hurt served him right.

Besides that, it made him actually feel alive.

Waltz

He leads her slowly up up up into the sky, past the wispy clouds, out of the atmosphere entirely and soon they are circling one another in a carefully executed dance.

A waltz in the stars... he in his zipcraft and she in hers, spiraling so close to one another that they can just glimpse each other through the thick plexiglass domes of their cockpits.

She takes one hand from the controls, risky business when they are so dangerously near and moving so recklessly fast, and she blows him a kiss with a wink.

Then abruptly she dips out and away, spinning out and encouraging him to give chase.

Round and round they go, climbing a vortex together and then dashing apart, instinct rather than choreography guiding their movements.

Pursuit, pivot, reverse, twirling twirling twirling.

They drift intentionally towards the congestion of Gate traffic... large shipping vessels, personal zipcraft like their own, pleasure yachts, interplanetary transport ships, and more.

Now they zip and zoom in between obstacles. It is more than just their own lives on the line now (it's also incalculable woolongs down the drain if they should cause an accident that anyone can trace back to them) and the challenge brings them both heady delight.

Back and forth, up and down, banking hard to the left and then hard to the right, flipping around to come back upside down so he can give a jaunty wave to her below him.

The radio chatter is alive with profanities spewed in their direction. Vehicles slamming on brakes or swerving needlessly to avoid the wild pair who are dauntless in their daredevil game.

And then they burst out of the crowd into the wide open star space outside of the shipping channels and standard fly zone... out into that great good night.

Stars twinkle distantly, lightyears beyond even the reach of the Gates.

A ship hums in the vastness and draws them like a homing beacon to the welcoming deck and the relative warmth of the hangar (once the door is closed and air is pumped back in)

Spike is there at the base of her ship when she opens the hatch and gives him a grin.

He takes her hand, tumbles her down into his arms, and dips her down to the floor to ravish her willing lips with a kiss.

Sleep Deprivation

Isolation Chamber | Forced to Stay Awake | "Leave the lights on."

The room was bright bright bright.

Darkness had no home. Shadows were nonexistent.

There was only light.

Squares on the ceiling, squares on the floor.

Tubes in his hands, tubes in his head.

So bright bright bright.

Lasers shining in his eyes.

Left alone alone alone.

One man all on his own in the square room with the squares everywhere and the bright bright light.

There was no sleep. Forced to stay awake. Study the effects of sleep deprivation, they said.

There was no food. Injections instead. Study the effects of this drug and that toxin and those antibodies.

Sometimes he ran.

Sometimes he danced jerkily as they tugged his puppet strings.

Sometimes they shot him point blank.

Tubes in his skull siphoning out his brains.

Men in bulky bio hazard suits talking about him softly loudly constantly except when they stared so quiet.

Like the cat.

Staring.

One eye normal, one eye strange.

Strange strange strange.

Staring through him. Staring at his soul.

Considering him. Weighing him. Judging him.

There were scans and there were tests and there was the cat.

There were needles in his skin and hoses hooked to his face and the cat.

There was bright bright bright.

Endless bright.

Horrible bright.

There was a thin man once with thoughts in his head.

He was bigger now, shaped by medication and experimentation.

He knew pain and he knew agony and he knew misery and he knew he was alone.

Save for the cat.

The cat with the hateful stare.

Over and over and over again they drilled him on weaponry.

On fighting skills and hand-to-hand combat and boxing and more.

Over and over and over again they left him muddled on an intoxicating blend of poisons.

There was no sleep.

There was no food.

Alone in the bright.

Tortured and scanned and studied.

Trained and tormented and alone alone alone.

Alone in the bright.

Cat's eye shining into his own.

Alone in the bright with no thoughts in his head.

There was only the pain and the hateful stare and the hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt.

Endless bright, endless suffering.

Teeth clenched against excruciating pain.

Muscles twitching in spasm.

Screams echoing in the chamber where they kept him.

Feeding him vial after vial of unknown liquids.

Untested until him.

Trial run.

Break him break him break him down.

Cat's toy.

All alone, always alone...

In the bright bright bright...