Cowboy Bebop Fan Fiction ❯ No Nothing ❯ Chapter 6 ( Chapter 6 )

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Many thanks to Cherry Cheese Head, LexiRoSe, SilverHeart, and kara!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Chapter 6

The assembly of bounty hunters traipsed through the doors separating the Ganymede Police Station from the rest of the public. While the others pocketed their share of the reward, Jenni gingerly fingered her portion as if it might slip from her grasp at any given moment. "I don't think I've ever held this much honestly-earned dough in my life," she said, happily placing the money deep inside a pocket.

Faye began loftily walking off in the opposite direction. "I'll see you guys later," she said, a bit of a mischievous nature to her voice. "I'm off to double this chump change-"

"At the casinos," Spike, Jet, and Ed finished for her. The only acknowledgment she gave them before disappearing was a little wave over her shoulder. Spike shook his head while pulling out a cigarette and muttering, "More like double her debts." His lighter barely flickered with life, using up its last breath on the cigarette overhanging from Spike's mouth.

"Edward wants caaaaaaaaaaaandy!!" their young companion yelled before taking off down the street, canine friend in tow.

The three of them stood in the middle of the street, watching their young companion with interest. Once her gangly form melted into the crowd, Jet began to make his way back to the ship. "I've got some repairs to do on the BeBop," he explained to them. "Catch you guys later!"

Taking in her surroundings, Jenni quickly calculated her actions for the afternoon. "C'mon," she said to Spike before grabbing hold of his wrist and dragging him after her down the somewhat busy street. "You're not doing anything, so you get to come with me."

Spike tried stalling his most recent captor. "Exactly where are you going?" he asked, uncertain if he really wanted to know.

A grin that plainly spelled out 'agony' for the person on the receiving end spread across her face as she said, "We are going shopping."

"WHAT!?" Spike yelled so loud that many passers-by looked at him in surprise. He wrenched his wrist from her slack grip and stood rooted to the spot. Jenni, however, was unfazed. "Where the hell do you think you're taking me?!" he questioned in an incredulous tone. "This is bullshit, I'm not some sort of -"

Jenni rolled her eyes in a fashion that said she was expecting this kind of reaction. "Yes, Spike, I'm taking you shopping with me." He was about to protest once again, when she gave him a glare that would make the Grim Reaper cower in fear. "Don't give me that shit about you having something better to do, because I know you would have gone and started it already. I'm sick of sitting around in your old stuff while the same thing I've been wearing for the past week is washing, and it's your fault I don't have any clothes to begin with!" she hissed at him in something close to aggravation.

"How do you figure this is my fault?" Spike asked in a tone very similar to Jenni's.

"Uh, hello? Weren't you the one who dragged me off Mars without any warning whatsoever?"

"Well excuse me for not letting you know when I was going to pick you up for your nine-million woolong bounty!"

"You didn't have to go after my bounty to begin with!"

"Gah, you're as bad as Faye!!"

"And you're a stubborn jackass with nothing better to do! Now come on!!" As she calmed down a bit, both of their stomachs gave a loud rumble. "But first," she said, "some food and a lighter."

Scratching his head with the heel of his hand, Spike grinned at her and said, "You're screaming at me one second, and offering me food the next. You never cease to amaze, do you?"

"Nope," she said while pressing the end of the cigarette in her mouth to the lit one in his. The glow muted itself for a second, but then became brighter than before at the ignition of a second cigarette. "And, as you know, my bounty isn't exactly cleared yet," she said as they began their journey down one of the streets.

Spike removed his jacket and slung it over his left shoulder while turning to address Jenni on his left. "So you want me to play bodyguard too, huh?"

Batting her eyes in an obviously forced performance, Jenni said, "If you don't mind." She reverted back to her normal self immediately, to both her and Spike's relief. "You don't want some crazy bounty hunter to try and drag me off to the ISSP, do you?"

"No, I don't mind, because I don't want to see the poor sap's medical bill after you've finished with him," he said before taking an extensive drag from his cigarette and placing his free hand in his pocket, shoulders slumped in his usual stance.

"Then I take it you're coming?"

Tilting his head back so he was looking at the sky, Spike exhaled the stream of smoke and wearily said, "Let's just get this over with." Jenni looped her arm with Spike's and led, or more appropriately dragged, him off for what was to be a day of absolute hell.

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"Ah! Sir, would you mind not smoking in here? It could ruin the fabrics!" an overzealous salesclerk told Spike the moment he stepped in the shop with a cigarette still protruding from his frowned lips. This was the third time he had been asked not to do so in the past two hours, and he was becoming quite sick of it. To appease the seller, Spike irritably smothered the freshly lit cigarette beneath one of his clunky boots while uttering a string of profanities. His actions earned him a strangled "Eek!" from the shop assistant as he fell to his knees to sweep up the ash from the carpet, all the while glaring warningly in Spike's direction.

Jenni poked her head around a corner to see the little episode at the door. "Hey, Señor Destruction! Come here for a sec!" she yelled across the store to him.

Sulking over to her, Spike watched his partner jump and stretch for something located on a shelf way above her reach. While her pursuit for the overhead object continued, the hem of her shirt and jacket inched up farther and farther. Spike noticed, since his attempts not to were failing miserably, that a large mark had somehow in the past found its way onto her lower back. The longer he watched the more of that mark revealed itself, and was starting to take shape near the bottom. Scales soon became distinguishable, and that was all Spike needed to see. He came up right behind Jenni and whispered in her ear, "So what's that on your back?"

She jumped at the sound of Spike's whisper, but immediately froze as what he just said registered in her mind. "N-Nothing, it's nothing," she stammered while pulling her clothing down over her back. "Now why don't you grab that up there," Jenni said to Spike while gesturing towards what she had been reaching for, almost as if the past few seconds had never happened.

Easily, Spike grasped the object and held it out for Jenni. She quickly took it and shook out the black wad to reveal an overly large sweater. Jenni promptly threw it back onto the shelf and continued looking around until she came face-to-face with the barrel of a gun.

"I've got you now!" a raspy voice from behind the gun said triumphantly. The owner of both the weapon and the voice was a graying middle-aged man who barely reached up to Jenni's shoulders. The pistol shook lightly in his hand, but his leering smirk remained. "You're nine-million woolong bounty is mine!" Brandishing a pair of handcuffs at her, the older bounty hunter said, "Once I get you in these, it's off to the ISSP we go!"

She backed up until she was leaning against Spike and said, "I'd really rather go with him. He was much nicer about it, you know."

Her not-quite captor looked slightly baffled at this remark. "Much nicer about what?"

"About taking me to the cops," Jenni said pleasantly. "He was polite, didn't force me to do anything -"

A few angry gunshots were fired into the ceiling, inducing the clerk at the door to pass out. "GODDAMMIT!! YOU'RE MY BOUNTY, AND I SAY MOVE!!!!!!" the now red-faced hunter yelled at Jenni.

Spike, who hadn't said a word during this little confrontation, finally said, "Plaster."

The bounty hunter gave Spike a look that blatantly said 'clueless', and even gave a stupefied "Huh?" to go with it. "What was that, Skinny?"

The name only made Spike smile. He'd wanted something to bash that guy over the head since the moment he stuck that damn gun in Jenni's face, and the name he'd heard so many times in the past just made the desire increase. Finally, his wish was about to come true. Pointing up to the ceiling, Spike repeated himself. "Plaster."

Jenni's attempted hijacker followed Spike's finger with his eyes until they landed on the section of plaster ceiling above his head that was crumbling away due to the recent gunshots to it. Holding his hands over his head in a feeble attempt to protect himself from the falling debris, the hunter let out a small yelp before the ceiling came crashing down overtop him.

Spike and Jenni seized this opportunity to make a mad dash for the door. Vaulting over the salesclerk passed out in front of the door, Jenni led Spike back onto the main street. "I told you some other bounty hunter would try and take me in," Jenni said while they calmly ambled down the mostly deserted lane.

"I don't doubt it; nine-million woolongs is a lot of money," Spike said as he lit a cigarette to satisfy his addiction. Placing the shiny new lighter back in his pocket, Spike's attention strayed to two men clad in professional-looking suits and dark shades. One casually glanced towards Jenni, and had to do a double take. He elbowed his partner in the ribs and pointed straight at her, causing the other man to stop dead in his tracks. After a curt nod to each other and the two men briskly made their way towards Jenni and Spike. "They friends of yours?" Spike asked his compadre with ease.

"You could say that," she said while brightly smiling at the approaching figures. "What a pleasant surprise, Wade, Don," she said to them in a friendly tone. "Can I help you guys?"

Don stepped forward and said to Jenni, "Turo has had us looking all over the galaxy for you, Miss Nox." He pulled a small handgun from inside his suit jacket and held it pointed towards Spike. "Once we kill and dispose of your captor, you will join us on our trip back to Tharsis City."

Placing her hand on the barrel, Jenni lowered the gun and said to them in an authoritative voice, "Sorry, guys. Tell Turo I send my regards, but there's been a slight change of plans."

The other man, Wade, took a step forward. "Jenni, you are a crucial asset to the order of the Black Cobras -" His speech was cut short by a swift flying kick to the side of the head, a kick that carried through to his partner. Both men fell to the ground, unconscious.

Jenni stood up straight and began twirling one of the fallen men's pistols. "Never did like those two much." They continued their trek down the street until a car stopped abruptly in front of them. It was a black sedan with a gold design embossed on the rear doors. Upon closer inspection, the design proved to be a cobra enclosed in a border of thorns. "SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!!" Jenni grabbed Spike's arm as the rear door swung open and dashed as fast as humanly possible in the opposite direction. Gunshots echoed off the building walls, and one ricocheted off a brick and singed the top of Spike's hair.

Although his hair was the least of Spike's worries right now, that bullet had come close to turning the lights off for him. Too close. Gun in hand, he blindly shot a few rounds behind him. He hit one guy, but didn't turn to see who or where.

Dodging behind an old broken-down cruiser, Spike and Jenni each took their turns at shooting off a round of shells at their syndicate nemesis. Every now and then they could hear the sickening cry of agony as one of their bullets entered one of the syndicate members, or the razor-sharp whoosh as an opposing bullet missed their heads by a few mere centimeters.

A car door slammed shut as the sound of an automobile drifted through the noise of gunfire. Peering around them, the partners-in-crime surveyed the damage they had caused in that narrow street. Seven. Seven people lying on the pavement, either dead or clinging on to dear life. Both of them stared in masked horror at the cold reminder of what they once were, and in some ways still are. "C'mon, let's head back," Jenni said while stooping to pick up the miraculously intact bags. "I don't know about you, but I need a drink."

Spike offered her a cigarette, which she gratefully accepted, and lit one for himself. "You read my mind."

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The overturned bottles and empty glasses littered the room like fallen soldiers in battle. Considering how much he had drank, Spike found himself balancing pretty well on the line between sober and drunkenness. Jenni, on the other hand, having consumed almost three times the amount Spike had, was pretty . . . unstable at the moment.

Spike watched the woman grope for a sturdy surface to sit or possibly lay on. She found the table in front of him on the couch quite suitable for that purpose. "Are you okay?" he asked uncertainly as she began to lean threateningly far to one side

"Yeah, I'm fine," she said before nearly toppling off. Jenni somehow managed to regain enough posture to state the painfully obvious. "Who the fuck am I trying to kid. I'm trashed beyond belief." She then spread her legs apart and rested her hands on the tabletop between them. Leaning forward, her shirt, which was actually Spike's, began to fall suggestively far down both in front of her and off her shoulder. "What, you gonna try and take advantage of me now?"

He sure as hell wanted to at that particular moment in time, but something in his head told him not to. Damn conscience. "No, I'm not."

Jenni sprawled out over the table, knocking a few bottles onto the floor. Drawing an invisible picture in the air with her finger, she said, "Most men would. Most men are sex-crazed maladroits."

This comment struck Spike as surprising. Embarrassingly true, but surprising all the same. "Must not have met many decent men," Spike said as he lit up a cigarette.

What began as a small giggle erupted into a raucous laugh from Jenni as she recalled the answer to Spike's inquiry. "No, I guess I haven't. Lemme see . . . there were my dad and my brother, but they don't count. Um . . ." she said before temporarily dozing off for a few seconds. Waking up, she immediately picked up their conversation right where she left off. "Nik was a good guy, but I haven't seen him in years." Jenni's head flopped over to smile at Spike and she finished off with, "And you're not so bad, either."

Although the comment caused Spike to smile, it was a sad smile. She had no idea what kind of a monster he had been in the past. The syndicate did that to people, most people. There were the few who either shed their malicious blood after escaping, and those who somehow managed to evade the horrors altogether. He, however, didn't believe he was one of these lucky people. Handing Jenni his cigarette, Spike debated, "How do you know for sure? You've only known me for a little over a week. I could be a con artist, or a gangster. Or a murderer." The last bit he added was full of regret, for both the past he'd hoped to never remember and yet the parts he hoped to never forget.

Deeply inhaling, Jenni replied, "I dunno. There's just something about you that says you're a good person. It sure as hell doesn't scream 'Innocent' or 'Do-Gooder'. In fact, quite the opposite. But underneath all the protective armor you're wearing against everything on the outside, jaded as you may appear at first, there's someone beautiful. " She exhaled a stream of smoke into the air and continued. "There's also this sadness about you. Something happened in your past to scar you through your entire being." There was a long pause between them until Jenni sat up and asked, "Do you wanna hear the sad story I call my past?"

Spike sat up and took back the cigarette offered to him. "Yeah, I do."

Sitting up as straight as she could in her present state, Jenni began the lamenting story of her life. "I was born in space, on my family's ship, the Trilogy. It was built out of three different crafts, so no two areas were the same. We lived there for seven years. Just me, my mom and dad, and my brother Jimmi, who was five years older than me." A smile had graced her face at the memory of her family. "All four of us were so stubborn and persistent, I'm surprised we didn't kill each other. Yep, those were the happy days, when nothing ever went wrong." The smile fell into a sad frown as she continued. "They were too good to last.

"My dad wanted to settle down somewhere, to have a 'real home' for his wife and kids. None of us really wanted to, but I guess something told him it was for the best. So that's how we ended up on Venus, in the middle of a city called Sentor." There was a pause as she picked up the glass next to her and finished off the amber liquid. "My mother died of Venus Sickness when I was nine, and my father followed a few months later, this time of a broken heart. Kinda romantic, if you think about it," she said with more than a hint of nostalgia.

"I didn't know what we were going to do. Two kids living on the streets of a city on Venus isn't exactly the best situation to be in. But clever Jimmi, he came to the rescue. He'd been talking to this net-diver on Earth since Mom started getting sick. This guy, Nikolai, was only fifteen when Jimmi met him, but he had a place on Earth. Nik was nice enough to offer for us to stay with him, rent-free. We took him up on his offer, of course, and snuck aboard an Earth-bound jetliner the next afternoon.

"I'll tell you, firsthand: Earth is the biggest hellhole in the entire galaxy. Meteor showers every day, everywhere is pretty much run into the ground, and it's each person for themselves. Family systems are a thing of the past," she said, waving her hand in the air. "Good thing Nik was there for us. But still, even though he was like family, we weren't a family."

This time, not bothering with a glass, Jenni grabbed the entire bottle by the neck and held it in front of her lips. "Six years passed, and in that time I'd managed to learn all the hacking techniques that took Nik his whole life to master." She took a swig from the foul-smelling bottle and continued. "That still didn't make up for the fact that Jimmi was never around, and we had no idea where he was. But it wasn't long until I found out where my brother always disappeared to; I still wish I never knew.

"One night, in the middle of December, Nik and I were just sitting around when these two really big guys in suits stormed into our shack. Nik told me to get the hell out of there while he tried to stop them. Of course, what kind of chance did some spindly little guy have against five-hundred pounds of force. They easily whacked him out of the way, grabbed me, and knocked me unconscious. Next thing I know, I'm in the backseat of some car on Mars. Once those goons noticed I was awake, one of them pulled open the door and wrenched me out. Although I tried at numerous points in that short period of time, I didn't stand a fighting chance at escaping. They just kept dragging me down that alley, not saying a word. It seemed like it lasted forever, but once we got to the end it didn't seem long enough.

"There was just one overhead lamp in the courtyard. In the middle of it was Jimmi, either dead or unconscious. From somewhere outside the circle of light this man entered. He was a short, balding Chinese guy with a cold, bitter expression. He walked up to my brother and, with no warning at all, kicked him in the stomach. 'Idiot boy,' he said. 'You were supposed to quietly go in and get the money. NOT leave the place in rubble!' he shouted before kicking him again. Jimmi just groaned in pain on the ground, while this man, Turo, turned to face me. 'Lucky for you, I think your sister's talents in net-diving will cover your mistakes this time,' he said. Addressing me, he said, 'How would you like to join our little group, the Black Cobras?' The only response he got from me was a giant lugie in the face."

Spike laughed inwardly, so as not to disturb her. Jenni didn't notice, and continued on with her tale. "I already hated that man, and he must have known it. 'Allow me to rephrase that,' he said. 'Join us or you both die.' Jimmi was weakly screaming for me to say no, but that just made me more flustered, and somebody help me I said yes. Turo just smiled that cruel smile of his before turning and walking away from me.

"Those same guys that dragged me there dragged me back out onto the street. But before we even got close, I heard Jimmi yell something at Turo. Something about how this guy Mao not being merciless enough to kidnap a teenager and drag her into this hell. Turo got this look in his eyes, even colder than the one he gave me. 'I know no Mao,' he said. And you know what he did, Spike?" Spike shook his head as if saying 'No.' Jenni stood up and shaped her hand like a gun. Touching the tip of her index finger to Spike's forehead, she said one simple word. "Bang."

Her solemn expression didn't change as she removed her finger, except for the tears starting to make their way down her cheeks. "After that tyrant put his fucking pistol to my brother's forehead, I watched him pull the trigger. I watched the bullet go all the way through Jimmi's head, and I watched him fall, lifelessly, into a pool of his own blood."

Jenni, strong, capable, defiant Jenni, broke down completely into Spike's lap. He had always been very uneasy around women when they got emotional to the point of tears; like most men, he would rather be thrown into a deep pit with a half-starved lion. Oddly enough, he found it very easy to wrap his arms around her shaking figure and hold her to him. Gently, he rocked her back and forth in his arms, stroking her hair and whispering words of comfort into her ear. Looking up at him, eyes tear-soaked and red, Jenni whispered, "How do you escape this?"

No matter how intoxicated he was, Spike's jaw dropped in shock and his eyes nearly popped out of his head. Parts of his dream came flooding back to him. The book, the alley, the question; they all clicked together and pointed straight at Jenni. He was about to tell her of this recent revelation, but she had quietly fallen asleep in his arms. "You'll find a way," he said before closing his eyes and drifting off to nothingness.

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His head had stopped pounding earlier that day, which gave Spike enough peace of mind to light a cigarette. Before he had time to dwell on what he'd heard two nights before, Jenni ambled into the room, looking much worse for wear. "Yo," Spike greeted while holding a glass out to her.

"Ugh, exactly how much did I drink last night?" Jenni asked, glaring at the Prairie Oyster in her hand.

"You mean two nights ago. Let me see . . . I drank enough to stop a crazed rhinoceros in its tracks." Seeing the questioning stare he was receiving from Jenni, Spike continued. "You drank about three times that amount."

Groaning, Jenni slid down the wall she was leaning against. "Bottoms up," she said before holding her nose and draining the contents of the glass, just like she did only a while ago. "So, how bad was I?"

Spike wouldn't meet her eyes as he said, "You told me your life story."

If she was still drinking that dreadful Prairie Oyster, Jenni would have most likely choked to death. "I didn't," she said, wide-eyed in horror and disbelief. "Please tell me I didn't."

Spike just nodded. Catching her eye, he smirked before saying, "Other than that, you were the most level-headed drunk I've ever met."

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