Rewatching Cowboy Bebop again & I always love how quickly Jet goes from Rugged Bachelor to Unapologetic Girl Dad the moment Edward joins the crew.
Despite Jet not being as prickly about kids as Spike pretends to be, fatherhood rarely comes up as something he’s ever earnestly considered nor aspired to seemingly even during his relationship with Alisa long ago. Even from what we hear about their disillusionment, the subject of family-building isn’t highlighted as being related in any way to the friction between them when they were together or if it was it was negligible.
So even though Jet drifts into a pseudo-paternal role from a few times pre-Edward, I still grin at the moments he straight up kinda just acts like a dad when Edward finally does enter the picture. From listening to (& forgetting) Ed’s requests for souvenirs, to telling her myths & fairy tales including going so far as adopting a slightly whimsical vocal cadence similar to what teachers & librarians often use when they read aloud to children, to letting Ed cling to his shoulders when the Bebop’s internal gravity is off so she can get pulled along while floating behind him.
Heck, due to certain events in one of the last few episodes, Faye & Ed both return to the Bebop in a noticeably uncharacteristic mood and Jet pulls the classic clueless but loving dad move of cooking for his daughters for them believing their sourness is the result of hunger 😂
Also one the best & very hilarious bits of the episode: Brain Scratch has Jet & Edward posing as father & daughter, both dressed to the nines & spinning a BS sob story all in an effort to get access to a hospital room for an investigation.
It’s such a fun dynamic that causes an increased amount of heartbreak during a certain moment in the series’ concluding episodes & one more reason I have the blasphemous & saddening wish that Cowboy Bebop had more episodes or at the very least a few more movies to see more of the rich interpersonal relationships the Bebop Family had with each other.
"Whatcha doing, Faye-Faye?" Ed queried as she scampered over the dunes to where the older woman was using a stick to swiftly write words onto the wet sand before the surf washed up to erase it all away.
Faye glanced at the girl as she paused, stick held slightly aloft, and then looked at the others. Spike sat on the beach nearby with his feet soaking in the salty water, occasionally picking up small pebbles to skip across the surface of the ocean. Jet was stretched out on a sheet they had brought from the ship, Ein dozing at his side while he tanned. Neither seemed to be paying any mind to the girls.
"Writing messages to be washed away." She replied. "You can do it too. Purge out all the sad and the bad and what makes you mad. Release the negativity. It's not healthy to keep stuff bottled up inside... Here at the beach you can just... Let it all go..."
"Hmmm." Ed nodded thoughtfully. "This is true. It isn't good to hold onto things that hurt. Buuuuuuut... Hmmm.... Faye-Faye, are you open to change?"
Faye's brow wrinkled into a frown. She cast another glance at the guys. Jet was snoring in tandem with Ein but Spike was now watching her and Ed. He raised his brows at her as if curious about her answer as well.
Biting her lower lip, Faye decided to be bold. Spike's interest was hardly something to spook her. Rather, it seemed like an opportunity to impart some much-needed wisdom on the fool.
"You have to change in life, kid." She said to Ed. "If you can't adapt then you won't survive. Everything changes and we gotta roll with the punches too."
Ed beamed at her and held out her hands for the stick. "Very good!" She cheered, sounding like a school teacher impressed with a student. "Ed suggests we write good things in the sand instead! Optimistic things! Hopes and dreams! We can put that energy out into the universe so the tide can bring back all the hopes in whatever beautiful form we need."
The teen immediately set to scratching letters into the sand with a giddy laugh. Faye watched with a bemused smile and tried to ignore the butterflies that began to dance in her stomach when Spike rose from his lounge position to stand at her side.
Woolongs
Piyoko
Feast!
Engine parts
Ammo!
Adventure!
Love!
Spike chuckled. "Well, she has some good ideas there. We could use all those things, I'd say."
Blushing, Faye gave him a considering look out of the corner of her eye. "Is that so?"
He flashed her a confident grin. "I know so. Ed, lemme see that stick."
"Yo-kay doe-kay!" She grinned, sized up the space between them, and hurled it at him like a javelin.
"Whoa!" Spike yelped as he snatched the projectile. "Thanks." He told her with sarcasm heavy in his tone.
Ed chortled. She gave a salute before dashing out into the waves to kick at the water as if to send it back out to sea.
Spike looked at Faye again before setting the stick into motion in the sand.
Thanks to @bebopcrew for the prompt list! This one takes place about ten years before the events of the series, and slightly before Spike joined the Syndicate—I used this timeline from The Cowboy Bebop Attic, which places Spike’s Syndicate years at about 2061-62 to 2068. This fic turned out WAY longer than I planned, and I stayed up WAY later to write it than I'd hoped, so apologies if some of it makes no sense at all, but I had fun with it!
Okay, so technically speaking, Spike didn’t have a real spaceship’s license yet. And technically speaking, this wasn’t even his ship. One could even say he’d stolen it. But did it really count when it was from the garage of one of those crazy Martian billionaires who probably had fifty identical, sleek and newly-purchased ships in their garage? They wouldn’t notice this one was missing at all.
Spike had engaged in petty thievery before, sure, but this was different. This was the big leagues. A ship of his very own—now that he’d wiped the tracking and identification as best he could with his shoddy, hodgepodge tech skills—opened up whole new worlds to him, literally. After seventeen years of being stuck on Mars, hopping ineffectually from city to city whenever he could hitch a ride, he’d crossed a Hyperspace Gate for the very first time and, after some annoying waiting, was by a whole new planet in a matter of minutes.
Once he arrived, it was an adventure in itself to try and navigate the overlarge ship past all the debris and space junk that circled Earth, almost like an old video game. And then he could see it, the pockmarked blue marble floating in space. A whole new planet. Although he was alone, he couldn’t help but give a low whistle at the sight. He wasn’t given to poetry, but he had to admit a sight like this would be breathtaking to anyone.
And the flying itself! Okay, so technically he’d never been in a ship’s cockpit before, but it wasn’t too hard to figure out the controls. He’d driven a car, and the mechanics of this weren’t too different. But flying? It was light-years away from driving.
He loved everything about it: the way the stars raced past him in the cockpit window, the whooshing sensation of freefall in his stomach as he dipped and glided and spun just for the hell of it, the way the ship responded beautifully to his every little touch to propel him faster and faster into the darkness as he whooped in delight. The way no one could find him or catch him way out here. It was freedom, so much more than he’d thought he’d had before on the streets, so much more than he’d even thought possible. It awakened dormant parts of him he didn’t even know existed.
It was bliss.
That is, until he pushed too hard and too fast—or maybe the dumb ship’s controls responded too well—and found he’d somehow fucked up. The ship was rapidly losing power and altitude, careening down towards Earth.
Shit, shit, shit! Spike wrenched at the controls and pushed frantically at all the buttons he could reach, pretty much at random, trying desperately to silence the beeping warnings that flashed all around him in the cockpit. And maybe it slowed down his entry speed a little. But it didn’t stop the warning signs from flashing faster and faster and more urgently, and for Earth’s surface to grow larger and larger below him. And eventually all Spike could do was curl up in the cushy pilot’s seat and brace for impact as best he could.
The ship crash-landed at what had to be a horrific angle, leaving a trail of cratered dirt and debris up until its final resting point. Rocks and detritus rained down, marring the ship’s perfect surface and adding another strain to the deafening noise. Airbags deployed all around Spike, burning against his skin. For the first few minutes, Spike wasn’t entirely certain he’d survived.
Figures. My first-ever real taste of freedom, and I almost die not even twenty-four hours in.
Well, if he really was dead, at least they couldn’t catch him for stealing that ship.
~~~~~
Of course, after a while Spike had to realize that he was, in fact, alive, and unfurl himself from the ruined cockpit to clean up his mess.
The trip had been pretty impulsive, and he didn’t know what, exactly, he’d been expecting to find on Earth, but he had expected to return to his home planet eventually. He knew that owning a spaceship of his own could open up a lot more opportunities to get money and power and a bit of food in his stomach. It could even make him look more attractive to some of the bigger crime syndicates on Mars, even if he still had to start out as a grub doing all the grunt work. At least they’d consider him.
But for that, his spaceship had to be working. And as he surveyed the ship, having extricated himself from the wreckage and now looking up at it with arms akimbo, he figured that his hodgepodge tech skills wouldn’t be of much help here at all.
At least it wasn’t on fire. Maybe a better mechanic could somehow revive it, even if they had to replace all its parts one by one, like that old Earth story about the wooden boat. It would be better than no ship at all, especially if it made him harder to catch by the guy he’d stolen the ship from.
He should be as destroyed as the ship, he thought. He really shouldn’t have survived that crash. Maybe he had a lucky star up there, somewhere, watching out for him.
Somehow, he doubted that.
There was only one thing he could do. He hated feeling dependent like this, and if it didn’t work pretty soon, he may as well pack up and set out on his own—find some decent food and shelter, try his luck on Earth, maybe eventually find a way back home, such as that home was. But for now, he let out a defeated sigh, leaned against the ship’s ruins, and held up one thumb.
He saw rockets taking off in the distance; he heard the distant purr of cars’ engines. There had to be someone willing to pick him up eventually and take him to a place where his ship could maybe get fixed. If his lucky star was still watching out for him. If it even existed at all.
~~~~~
“This isn’t getting fixed today, kid.”
“Whaddya mean?” Spike scowled at the mechanic—Doohan, according to his assistant who’d driven Spike here—an old, cantankerous-looking guy with goggles perched on top of his wild gray hair. Every part of his clothing was either singed or actively smoking. He’d thought a guy like this could bring his ship back to life right away, as if by magic.
Doohan was still peering around the ship with an appraising eye, examining the mangled remains of its dashboard, the hunks of metal that used to be its hull. “I can keep it here and modify it. Or, if it turns out to be truly useless, save it for scrap. But if you were planning to be out of here in an hour and race home on this pretty little number, that’s not happening.”
“But—but the person who drove me here, your assistant—Jimmy or something—he said you were the best mechanic this side of the planet. He said you could work miracles.”
The man snorted and turned away. “Flattery like that is exactly why he won’t last around here.”
Even though the news was a disappointment, Spike honestly kind of appreciated that Doohan wasn’t bullshitting him. And obviously, the guy knew ships. As Spike gazed around the hangar, he saw several ships of all sorts—some that must have been historical artifacts from the early days of hyperspace gates, some brand-new ones like the one Spike had just crashed—in varying states of repair. One, a half-finished model with a slender red body and a long nose, particularly caught his attention. Surprisingly, some sort of looked like what he had originally expected: old relics, nursed back to health. He wondered how many of those could actually fly. He wondered what it would feel like. Already, his hands itched for the controls of a spaceship again, any spaceship.
“It’s been through quite a crash,” Doohan said, squinting up at Spike from the other side of the ship. “Where’d you get a ship like this? Only to junk it up right away?”
Spike had long since learned that the best response to questions like this was to stay silent, so that’s what he did.
“Rather not say? Okay. What’d you do to crash it?”
Simple as possible. “I went too fast.”
Doohan grunted. “Seen that before. Teenage boys who think they know everything. They always think they’re invincible.”
Something about that smarted. It hit Spike in the chest, white-hot on his already-frayed nerves.
Doohan turned back to the wreckage. “They always eventually get cut down to size.”
Spike felt his hands involuntarily balling into fists.
“You think I’m some privileged little rich boy?” he said, and it came out as an unexpected growl. “I sure as hell know I’m not invincible. I’m from Mars, I just got here. I’ve got no family. I’ve been cut down to size plenty of times in my life.” His voice was getting louder, more insistent. “I need a ship, any ship. I can work off whatever debt I owe to you. But don’t go thinking I did this just for the hell of it!” His last words were a yell, echoing in the silence.
Doohan just grunted again, not looking up. Silence fell once again for a while as he fiddled with the inside of the ship, tinkering with his tools. Spike’s breaths came out shuddery, but slowing.
“I think something was fucked up with the accelerator,” Spike said, quieter this time. “It was my first time piloting a ship and I went through a Gate no problem, I could do loop-de-loops and shit, and I guess I went a little overboard. But I barely touched that pedal thing and next thing I knew I was crashing here. I think I could do better with another craft.” He looked up at Doohan, choosing his next words with caution. “Or if I could find out how this one worked. How ships work. And how to fly them for real.”
Doohan inspected a panel of metal sheetwork on the side of the ship, his face inscrutable.
“That was you,” he finally said. “Doing the loop-de-loops in the sky. That was you.”
“Uh, yeah.” Damn. Spike hadn’t been as surreptitious with that stolen craft as he thought.
“And you say that was your first time ever piloting a ship?”
“Yeah,” Spike said again.
Doohan made eye contact with Spike for the first time. “How’d you feel when you were up there?”
“Uhhh…good? Happy?” Dammit, Spike wasn’t good with talking about feelings or whatever, and Doohan looked thoroughly unimpressed with his attempts. He didn’t even really know why Doohan was asking about it, but he could tell there had been something different, something distinctive, about that feeling. He racked his brain for the right word to describe how it had felt, soaring through the stars.
“Free,” he finally said. “I felt free.” He cupped his hands as if around the controls in a ship’s cockpit, and he felt his eyes narrowing in determination. “I wanna feel that way again.”
Doohan nodded slowly, then put his hand on what used to be the hull of the ship. “New ships like this, they tend to be trigger-happy. They advertise responsiveness, they say they’re user-friendly, and then they go way too far with it.” Spike nodded. Reminded him of some people he knew back on Mars. “You’ve got some natural talent,” Doohan continued. “But if you want to learn how to fly a ship right, you have to know how it works. You either work for the machine, or it works for you.”
Spike nodded again, at first slowly, but then with more determination. He could do that. In fact, the thought excited him. Something to fill his days that wasn’t petty crime and rooting around for his next meal. Something that actually felt purposeful. Like he was born for it.
Doohan looked over the ships in the hangar, appearing contemplative. “Been working on fixing up that old MONO racer for a while now,” he finally said, gesturing to the red ship that had caught Spike’s attention earlier. “Now, get me a 3/8 gauge from the toolbox in my office.” He turned to the assistant, who’d been leaning against the car he’d driven Spike in and watching the conversation with interest. “Jimmy, you’re fired.”
“Aw, man,” the assistant said, staring down at his sneakers. “Mom’s gonna kill me.”
~~~~~
Spike had worked for Doohan for a few months now, learning the ins and outs of amateur spaceship repair, not to mention how to actually pilot different types of crafts so they wouldn’t crash. Over the course of weeks, they’d watched ships transform from beaten-up hunks of junk, or broken-down relics that belonged to a museum, to actually usable, sometimes even restored to their former glory. It was a hell of a hobby, but no one could say Doohan wasn’t passionate about it. He worked from sunup to long past sundown, through mealtimes and rock showers and explosions that signed off his eyebrows. And, Spike had to admit, it was gratifying seeing their progress every day and week, bit by bit.
Spike had memorized every tool Doohan owned, where to get or borrow the ones he didn’t, and which ones just flat-out didn’t exist. He was used to getting barked at by his boss, sent on so many impossible tasks and wild-goose chases that he could no longer count them, sometimes having sharp implements thrown at him. (He’d learned to only piss Doohan off when he was holding something soft like a newspaper.) But he’d managed to avoid getting unceremoniously fired, like poor Jimmy. Or quitting, like a lot of assistants in Doohan’s past apparently had.
It wasn’t like Spike wasn’t used to rebukes or harshness. In fact, he kind of appreciated that Doohan didn’t baby him. And he thought maybe Doohan respected that he didn’t crumple under the pressure—although that may just have been wishful thinking on his part.
Still, after a few months of practice, even Doohan couldn’t find fault with the way he flew. (Or at least not very much fault.) The controls felt natural in Spike’s hands, like an extension of himself. He could effortlessly swoop and dive through the sky, at least in Earth’s atmosphere, as easily as moving his own body. And no matter how often he set off from the hangar with a whoosh, or how often he practiced all the proper measurements and calculations to land the way Doohan had showed him, it still felt just as freeing as it did the first time. It gave him a strange, bright sense that maybe he could do more when he got back to Mars. Maybe he could have an actual future.
But it still caught him completely off-guard when Doohan took a satisfied look at the newly-refurbished MONO racer—the Swordfish II, he’d called it (Spike decided not to ask what had happened to the Swordfish I)—and declared, “It’s yours now.”
“M-mine?” Spike babbled, like some sort of idiot.
Doohan nodded quite sensibly, as if this were the only logical option and any idiot would understand that. “You’ve done enough work on it to have earned it fair and square. You know it inside and out. And besides, it’s sturdy enough that it should survive a crash or two.” And for the first time, he flashed a smile at Spike, a knowing gleam in his eye.
Spike smiled back. The ship really was beautiful, lithe and maneuverable but still tough. Not some delicate thing that would crash and burn at the slightest provocation. It had been through some shit, just like he had. And it had come out alive. Maybe it was an old model, but it was his.
The words Thank you felt awkward on his tongue, tripping it up. But he hoped his face would show his gratitude.
Doohan patted the ship’s hull in satisfaction. And okay, technically speaking, Spike knew it wasn’t meant for him, not really—but it felt almost like a pat on the back.
Midnight aboard the Bebop is loud. Faye had figured that out shortly after she comes on board. Neither of the men sleep. Once Ed joins them, sleep schedules seem to be a thing of the past. Wandering through the Bebop after dark is another experience entirely. The ship seems louder in the quiet space that passes for evening on the ship.
In truth, their sleep schedules are so messed up that the clock striking twelve doesn’t mean much in reality. They hunt bounties when they’re available. Eat when there’s food and sleep where they drop more often than not.
So to find Spike awake as the clock strikes midnight isn’t that unusual. Faye settles in to their usual routine when they both can’t sleep. She stares at the coffee in the pot as if it has all the answers to the universe.
It stares back and says nothing.
It taunts her in its silence.
Pouring the coffee into two cups, she throws a splash of milk into hers before she makes her way to the observation deck. When she sees Jet settled next to Spike she sighs.
Handing over both cups of coffee to the contemplative men, she returns to the kitchen to make her own cup. When she joins them again, a soft jazz record is playing through the speakers and neither man looks like they’ve moved a muscle.
Sighing, Faye plops down next to Spike and pulls out her cigarettes, lighting one before she inhales deeply. Spike pulls out his own pack and leans closer, using her cherry to light his own smoke. When he exhales it’s into her face and Faye inhales the smoke deeply before she coughs.
He’s not smoking a cigarette.
She’d been so tired she hardly noticed.
But sleep doesn’t come easy. Not when the money’s not rolling in. Bounties have been hit or miss lately. They’re all tired and beyond ready for a large payday.
She thinks of running.
Running so far that nothing could stop her.
Not even Spike Spiegel.
She wants to run.
Something in the way Spike looks at her stops her train of thought in its tracks.
“Running doesn’t solve anything, you know.” His words are spot on and she glares in his direction before she steals his coffee and nearly drains it.
A small price to pay for being so rude, all things considered. He seems nonplussed about it, simply stealing her coffee with that infuriating smirk on his face.
“It gets me out of here.” Not a lie. Jet gives her a long, hard look before he laughs.
“Yeah, but you’ll be back. You always come back.” He inhales on his own cigarette before giving her a pointed look. “Wonder why that is?”
Faye can’t answer him.
That’s enough of an answer on its own.
A watch ticks slowly. Counting down the minutes.
Time is meaningless of nights like these.
There’s nowhere to go.
Nothing to do.
No money to do anything if they wanted to.
So they sit and they smoke. They watch the stars overhead.
Each trapped by their own pasts; no matter how hard they try to outrun them.
For the @bebopcrew birthday celebration and for @eclaire-and-pocky and any other JetxFaye fans here 😘
***
"You're too tense." Jet informed her, voice hushed to reflect the nighttime hours currently being observed on the ship. "If this isn't okay..."
Faye shook her head back and forth in the negative. "No! No, this is good!"
She tried to focus on the attentive blue eyes of the man holding himself poised above her with the strength of his arms, both metal and flesh. She was delightfully bracketed by those powerful limbs and it was both a turn on and a relief. To have someone so tough on her side, looking out for her, protecting her when need be - even when she protested or pretended to be fine on her own...
"Ya gotta hush your thoughts, Faye. Just concentrate on how I'm making you feel. This doesn't have to mean anything, just relax." Jet went on, clearly under some delusion about where her head was at and what her intentions were with him.
"It does though. You're long term. Commitment. Dedication." She tried to explain.
He was no one night stand and that terrified her. Despite how long she'd been aboard the ship, it was still nerve-wracking to consider staying indefinitely. Not because she had better prospects out there and not because she was bored here and not because she didn't find him incredibly attractive.
A man who could cook, and clean, and wage war on your behalf? A man who could sew, and do laundry, and take care of a pet and feral child? A man who could kill or coerce confessions or play whatever role might need to be played... Her mind jumped back to how good he looked in his white suit when she first saw him as they fled the casino and then jumped again to the masquerade ball where he'd dressed as a hippie and then jumped again to him all greased up in his flight suit while elbows deep in machinery to ensure they could fly and fight and survive in space.
He was it. The whole package. And who was she to deserve that?
She wore revealing clothes and smoked cigars and could blow through a pack of cigarettes in a day. She drank and cursed and lied and cheated and stole. She couldn't keep a dollar to save her own life. She literally took the dog's food and ate it in front of him. What kind of person behaved in such a way? What kind of person could devote themselves to this wonderful man when they were so awful themselves?
She couldn't trust herself not to cut and run. She wanted to think she could be better, especially now that she had unlocked the mysteries of her own mind and had memories of being a better person when she was who she was before. But could she ever truly reconcile that Faye with who she had become? Could she ever be good enough for this spectacular man?
"You're thinking too loud." Jet insisted, sidestepping her declaration.
"You're the safe bet. The one I'm most scared to make." She confided at last. "I just... Don't want to gamble with your heart." She made a scoffing sound that came off a little wet due to the emotions she was trying to conceal or at least control. "I'm so inconsistent. Unreliable. I'm not worth the risk."
There. She admitted it. A truly vile woman would have simply taken the pleasures he was offering and dipped out in the middle of the night. She had to give herself a little credit for being brave enough to call herself out. To remind him of the mistake he was about to make and to do so in time for him to save himself instead.
But Jet just stared down at her with those brilliant blue eyes. He let the silence stretch on as he fixed her under his gaze, scanning over her features with a solemn expression on his face. She could understand how criminals would balk in interrogations with him. Why bounties froze when he leveled his gun and that hard eyed stare at them.
She was pinned in place and sure that he could read her thoughts - maybe even catch a glimpse of her rotten soul.
And then his lips crooked up into a sort of half smile and he bowed his head down to press a kiss to the corner of her mouth.
"There are no safe bets in life, Faye. But I dice with you all the time, even when I know you're cheating. I'm going into this with both eyes open. And, the door open too. If ever you should want to leave or need to leave... I won't stop you. But for now... I think we should roll the die. So close your eyes, quiet your thoughts, and let me explore all the ways I can make you show your tells."
