Disclaimer: I do not own Cowboy Bebop.

Of course she was in love with him.

The man made it all too easy, what with his annoyingly perfect air of nonchalance; it was as though nothing could ever touch him.

But something had. Something that had him by the heart and wouldn't let go until the nightmare ended. Something that had complicated everything and made everything seem so simple at the same time. Something that ended up being his reason for living, and reason for dying in his previously secure and promising life.

She didn't even know him when he met her. Hell, she was a popsicle at the time. All she knew was whatever had happened, it had made him the man he was, and destroyed the man he would have been. If only it hadn't been for Julia.

She who so easily stole his heart, who roped him off from the rest of the world. She...the girl who the hot-tempered vixen Faye Valentine could never be. Calm and wise, contemplative and reserved, a pale and melancholy face; glassy grey-blue eyes encasing a heart that held only mystery.

She could see why he fell in love with her; she was the dangerous, beautiful kind of ordinary that you couldn't leave alone. But the only thing Faye was interested in was the fact that she managed to break him, like a toy she got tired of playing with. And if it hadn't been for her, he would never have had to leave. She was the one thing preventing him from letting go of the past, like he had told her to do so many times.

She was the vision he had eternally burned into his right eye. He was only living to die for her.

And he did.

Why did she let herself linger in those thoughts? It brought nothing but pain, every time. Spike would have shot her if he saw her so wrapped up in her sad memories. She wished he could. If she had a woolong for every tear she had shed for him, she could pay back her veritable abyss of debt tenfold.

All the time passed since she received the information of his death served to overcome the shock of it all, but the pain would always be near. For a few weeks after the incident, Faye harbored a secret hope that one day he would come back, as if nothing had happened, and everything would go back to the way it was.

The way it was during the happiest ten months of her life.

Nothing had been even remotely the same after that week. It all happened so fast she hardly knew what exactly had happened. And even after devoting so many hours, days, even straight months trying to decipher why it had to all change in a few measly days, the answer still evaded her.

She refused to let it go and chalk another one up to fate.

There must have been some kind of reason behind all of it. Why she hadn't remembered anything before she was unfrozen for so long, only to have a breakthrough at the same time Ed found her father and left her beloved Bebop. Faye didn't like admitting it, but along the way she had developed a sort of soft spot for the kid. How could anyone not somewhat admire the way she was always able to bounce back from anything, with energy and brilliance to burn? Faye even found herself missing the company of that damn mutt. She was only beginning to adjust to her newly-acquired past and losing the smartest two beings on the ship when he left.

She knew where he was going, and tried to stop him, but it was useless. She had to stand there, firing shots into the ceiling and watching the man she cared so deeply for walk straight into the awaiting hands of death. If the heart made a sound when it broke, there was no doubt that would have been the shatter heard round the world.

How dare he leave her so alone and betrayed like that. Where did he get the nerve to be such a fucking hypocrite? She had just proved his own point, that the past brings nothing but trouble, and he was just going to walk away so guiltlessly, using his fake eye as an excuse for confronting his demons once and for all? She didn't buy it. If Spike was rotting away in hell right then, she hoped that he knew how her heart broke in that single moment.

And she hoped he felt like shit about leaving her that way.

The Red Dragon Syndicate was dissolved shortly after that violent evening, having Vicious killed, their building more or less destroyed, and a good percentage of his flunkies killed or incapacitated. She had to hand it to him, he was a dangerous man when he was determined like that, and she didn't doubt he accomplished everything he had set out to do, including his dramatic hero's death. The few terrified guards that did manage to get away ran as fast as they could and never looked back, off to perhaps try their hand at a less dangerous line of work.

There was never any official word as to whether Spike was alive or not, but as much as she would have liked to believe he was invincible, he wasn't, and there was no way a human being can cause that much damage and not get burned along the way. But even though she knew it deep down, she could never say it out loud; as though if she confirmed it herself, he would drop down dead on the spot if he wasn't already. Like the way every time someone says "I don't believe in fairies," one of them dies.

Faye's backlash to Spike's "disappearance" was harder for Jet to take than the situation itself, having to put up with her constant moping and mood swings while simultaneously nursing a sore leg and a very beat-up Bebop. Not to mention Faye's own shot-up zip craft.

She marveled at the way he had handled Spike's death without a single tear, but he tried to comfort her in the fact that Spike was ready to go, and he was sure he went out with a "bang". He assured her that it was supposed to happen that way, that it was the death Spike had been waiting to die since long before he even met him. But she just couldn't let it go like that.

Mere weeks later, Faye was gone. She stayed in a shitty hotel near her childhood home, attempting to regain her footing and just think. The bills were paid with money she didn't have, but that wasn't anything new. Hardly eating or sleeping at all, she was wasting away before her own eyes.

It didn't matter anymore though. She was unsuccessfully devoting her life to trying to just make some sense of it all. So many memories in such a short amount of time. She couldn't keep going before she sorted everything out once and forever. She would walk to the bulldozed foundation she called home, sit down amongst the rubble, and light a cigarette every morning, rain or shine.

Hopelessly trying to push aside her more recent pain and anguish and focus on uncovering something from her past to latch onto and keep her afloat, she didn't have a clue what she was looking for, but desperately needed a distraction.

It was funny how Spike maintained his water metaphor as a raging flood of memories. And knowing his ways, Faye wouldn't be surprised if he had been aware of it. No matter how hard she tried to suppress the most painful images, the more they surged to the top and before long she was drowning in them, her conscience fighting a losing battle against the relentless storm that was her past.

She had lived entirely without one for so long, it was about time that it caught up to her.