The Sideways Shuffle

First and Foremost-
I haven\'t written anything, at all for almost two years now, my name and applications for schools and jobs not withstanding. One morning i\'m drinking my coffee and this hit me out of freaking left field. IF you happen to read this, know that it\'s mostly an attempt to get back up on the horse, as it were, and well I always liked this pairing...
Many many thanks to my beta from well... i\'m not sure i can use her real name yet, so i\'ll ask next chapter. But all you need to know is she\'s a great fabulous wonderful beta and i may name a child or at least a piece of cutlery after her ^_^
Onward!!!

Oh yeah...
Incidently I don\'t own Bebop it\'s characters Ed Ein Jet Faye... or ... spike... I just keep him locked in my closet...

~*~


Step. Step. Whine... Step...

It was the smell that came to bother him the most. the smell of the unwashed human cities, of the dumps where she would throw herself down in a fit of glee or depression or something; one could never really tell with that girl, but never the less, whatever the emotion, whatever the inkling, she always did what she wanted loudly, and exuberantly. So watching the stars and meteors as they fell, in a sort of roulette pattern and marred the surface of the world was never as simple as just laying back and watching. Or rather it was, and therein laid the problem. She found it so inanely simple to just exist fully in each moment that the moments that precluded it meant absolutely nothing and he was left to growl at interlopers, to scrounge for food, to collapse with head on paws and miss the relative peace and quiet of the ship they had left. He had watched it, watched her watch it as it left, watched her spill the paint on the deck so they would know, that they would see her in her absence. Ein watched the sky, with his quiet companion, tried to ignore the smell of unwashed girl and refuse, and pined quietly.

She left in the morning, and Ein didn\'t move to follow. With a sad sigh she piled bits of rubble on top of the small body and a makeshift little whirly something or other she thought he might have liked piled up her computer box and danced her way into the warming day and decided today was the day she grew up. \"Happy birthday to Ed...\"

\"Oi.\" The muzzle of a gun woke her, and with a groggy groan Edward stretched, running gangly fingers through tousled hair and blinked sleepily at the barrel. The past few years had found her waking up in similar situations too many times for this to actually faze her anymore. Not that it really fazed her to begin with, but to startle and jump around seemed to be just as effective a defense as cowering and begging. It hadn\'t saved anyone else, and she saw no point in adopting it. In fact in moments like this, she was reminded of Spike, the mushroom lunk head with the wobbly arms and rubber body that never let anything bother him, at all. Even dying didn\'t seem to be a big deal to him, and while it still bothered her from time to time, Ed tried to think of life as a big puzzle to be put together. Her dreams were just too strange to apply to the here and now. The gun poked her forehead again, and she frowned at it.

\"M\'up...Whad’ya want?\" In her lap the newly pieced computer that replaced her old cardboard box set up hummed merrily, quietly unassuming and content to be left where it was. The gun smacked her across the face, and she moved with its momentum. She\'d found that taking a hit and standing still always hurt much, much worse, but it still hurt.
\"Stupid bitch, I said move!\" the gun sounded angry now, and her cheek was throbbing.
Ed shook her head.

\"That was a very silly thing to do Mr. Gun. You see, I thought we could be friends, but now...\" she shrugged and shook her head with a sad resigned air. The gun called a friend over to help and there was a spark, scream and a shower of water as the automatic fire system kicked in.
The Gun was yelling now, belching out the occasional bullet, and the Helping Hand seemed to be at a loss for what to do. It wasn\'t everyday that the person they grabbed hurt them back and disappeared. Ed watched them from her precarious perch of another seat and laughed aloud. The Gun and Hand whipped around and then stopped, eyes wide and stunned, and then with the grace of a fish falling back into the waters from whence it came, they flopped to the floor foaming, and convulsing.

Ed watched the display for a moment, shook her head, and began the messy work of collecting her bounty from the floor. She loved the looks on their faces when she trotted them in. Always. It was always the same. The Badge would call another Badge who showed up with Detective and then of course Cashier and the remarks about a bounty hunter so young, and so very capable. She laid in her hammock on the deck of her ship the Bo-beep and listened to the traffic of the Net.

She had excellent teachers. Well excellent in that they showed her exactly how not to catch a bounty. Really the Bebop had taught her much, the challenge was mostly figuring out what she had exactly learned from each experience. She\'d learned shady dealings of the heart, of manipulation, and the most important lesson, “Money makes the world go round.” Her first real goal upon leaving Ein all those years ago was to find money. She\'d landed her first billion six months later, and blew it all on this ship and the bribes to keep things running smoothly. She could go anywhere, do anything. And nostalgic for the life she had most enjoyed. Bounty hunting seemed only natural. Well, as natural as anything else she could pick up. Nothing was as easy as computers, but that just made it more fun. She had actually been surprised that she could bring in bounties faster than bebop ever did. It had turned into something of a hobby for her. Occasionally she would drop Jet hints, here and there; anonymously of course, he\'d probably flip out if he knew that she at the tender age of 16 was doing better than him. She still kept tabs on her friends. She\'d bailed Faye out more than once, and retrieved her ship from impounding at least twice. And Jet... well Jet she just managed to keep him enough in the black that he could add meat to those bell peppers occasionally. Honestly after a while, she decided that Jet really did prefer the simplicity of eeking out a simple living. And so her contributions were always discrete and hard to trace, his credits weren\'t docked as much as they had been for passage through the gates... certain stations just had a tab...

She hung a foot over the side of her hammock and sighed again. And then there was Spike. He had gone out in a blaze of glory and passion and revenge that rocked Mars, and then disappeared, presumed dead. She snorted at the ceiling. Not likely. That man had more lives than a cat and by her count he had only used three.

The alarm on the console began to trill three blind mice and she flipped over on her stomach to flip the switch. The main screen ceased its endless swirl’s that she left it to when the net diving became just too tedious and the bounty popped up on the screen. 60 mil woolongs. She stared at the image and the information for a moment before flipping off the hammock and plopping down onto the console. Spike had always said she looked like a monkey, and she had always grinned and flexed her toes at him in response (for reasons that her father had found endlessly amusing, nature had graced her with toes that worked just like stubby fingers). Sure bending in half and typing with her toes was a fun party trick and great for shock value, but at moments like this when time was against her, it was awfully convenient to be able to type with twenty fingers instead of just 10. As her feet brought up the display she grabbed her headset, slid the goggles home and switched on the power. With a bounty like that, she was fighting time. Ten minutes later she sat back and surveyed her work. The computer had already re-routed them, and she was already on her way to her 60 mil. With a laugh she flopped back into her hammock. He wouldn\'t know what hit him...

It was a crummy sort of dive, of the variety that only regulars frequented and never admitted it. The grimy men, still covered in the dirt and slime of a day in the mines glowered at her in exhaustion. Ed shrugged it off. She was out of place, but really she always was, if she let little things like fitting in bother her, she\'d probably turn around and march right out that door. But there was something more important on the line here, and she spotted it smoking a crumpled cigarette and hunched over the bar. Perfect.

With a yawn and a smile, Ed stretched to her full height noticing the glowering turn to appreciative stares. She\'d found that the developing of her slight body, while not as exaggerated as Faye\'s, was still enough to weasel by in a tight spot. She\'d taken to accentuating things, like her tiny waist left bare by her shirt, and her slender legs which were clad in her favorite pair of multi-pocketed pants. Her feet were also bare but they always were. Shoes were just too much of a hassle.

The mark at the bar didn\'t move, or seem to, but she saw it. That sudden stiffening, that tell-tale give away that the game was up, that he had been found. He raised a finger and the bar keep poured him another shot of whiskey. The element of surprise had been lost already, but he hadn\'t really seen her yet so shock was still a viable option. Letting out a breath she waltzed up to the bar, and seated herself next to him with an audacity that would have made Faye proud. She lifted a finger as he had, but the barkeep ignored her and walked past to another customer. She glowered at his back and tried again, and failed, again to gain his attention. She sat back in her seat and frowned. \"What does a girl have to do to get a drink in this place?\"
\"Be older than the bar tender\'s daughter for starters,\" a hefty miner jeered at a nearby table. She arched a thin eyebrow at the man and shrugged. She reached into her pocket and started emptying it out onto the bar in front of her. The patron\'s all tried hard not to look too terribly interested in the sizeable mess of randomness she was making. At last she found what she was looking for and slapped it down on the table, a picture. The bartender stopped for a moment to scold her out of his bar, and she grabbed his sleeve.

\"Have you seen this guy? Kinda bum? Kinda stupid? Kinda unlucky? Drinks a lot? Lazy?\"
He looked at the picture and then back at her. He dropped the picture as if it burned him and shook his head. She sighed and collected her belongings and began the tedious task of repacking her pockets. She began to leave the bar and then stopped. \"How bout you, Spike? You seen him?\" Her unresponsive bar mate, took a quiet drag on his cigarette and stared down the barrel of the gun she had pointed between his curiously colored eyes. He hadn\'t moved, hadn\'t tried to defend himself, just let her pull a gun while he smoked. She stared at him for a moment before shaking her head. \"You\'re not him. You\'re just a bounty. Move it bub.\"
The red eyes blinked silently, never leaving hers.

To her surprise he stood and walked out of the bar, his long legs eating up ground as she led him away. .He\'d let her cuff him, pay his bill and lead him out, all without a fuss. She attached the ties to a lead and pulled him along behind her to the landing field. This had gone way too smoothly. She\'d read the entire posting. This should have been much more difficult. A bullet whizzed past her ear and she broke into a run, dragging the lead behind her. Spike ran with her, and sensibly hid himself while the hail of bullets peppered the containers around them.

\"Damn it.\" she hissed. Thirty feet from Bo-beep and shooters. Spike leaned against the container and shrugged.

“Probably should let me go girl. They sound like they mean business.” She shook her head.

\"Not so easy Spike, now if it was Jet, then we\'d have a problem. As it is....\" she found the item she had been diving for in her pockets with a gleeful giggle. She turned a knob and pressed a switch and then let loose a whoop as the barrage of bullets suddenly stopped. Spike looked mildly surprised, and down right annoyed when she yanked him to his feet by the lead. \"Move your ass, if you don\'t want it Swiss cheesed!”

She ran as the bullets rebounded and fell around them, caught and dropped in the magnetic flux she had created. God, how she loved gadgets. She heard him sputtering as she pulled him up the ramp to her ship and shouted. \"Beep! Get your ass off the ground! NOW!\"
The ship whirred and beeped and groaned as the anti gravity booster knocked them off the runway and then wheezed as the auxiliary engines kicked in. Spike weaved a bit at the few bumps of leaving the atmosphere hit, and then fell over completely as a shot rocked the entire frame. She looped his lead over and behind the railing and kicked a box in his general direction.

\"Sit there and be still, you can do that, right?\" He said nothing, he merely stood there with his arms slightly raised and ignored the box. Ed left him to his own devices and kicked open the extra panel for her feet. \"Manual control Beep.\" The ship whirred it\'s compliance as Ed cracked her neck. If it was a fight they wanted, they wouldn\'t get it from her; but if they insisted she could certainly make their lives miserable. She snapped the goggles over her eyes, powered them up and lost herself in evasion and escape.

Two hours later she sat back, and rubbed her eyes. Video games just couldn\'t compare to the real thing. She\'d discovered this years ago. She lay flat on the floor and caught sight of her captive. Apparently the chase had been to boring for him. He sat against the wall, hands over his head, fast asleep. She stood and stretched, yawning and rolling her shoulders to get the stiffness out of them from sitting for so long. As she approached her captive she noticed that he had looped the lead around his hands, so that it looked like he was still secure. She chuckled and walked past him.

\"Since you figured those out, you want food?\" She heard a disgruntled grunt from the other room as she rummaged around the galley. She had never really figured out cooking. Actually it came down to the fact that she simply didn\'t care about the quality of food. Food was food. It kept her going, and made it easier to sleep. After that one week of nightmares that involved being swallowed by kitchen appliances, she\'d decided to keep a supply of those ready to eat bags of Styrofoam around. They didn\'t taste terrible, and were a helluva lot of fun to play with when she was bored. Granted now she had a guest, an important guest at that, and nothing but those little packs of dehydrated nothing to feed him. She glanced over her shoulder to the impossibly tall man in the doorway and grinned.

\"Think you can choke one down?\" He watched her in that quiet inscrutable way that was all Spike and leaned against the doorframe.

\"You\'re an awfully considerate jailer.\" She shrugged and tossed him a bag, which he caught without any extra movement. His hand simply snagged it out of the air. She sat back on her heels and tore open a bag marked stroganoff. She grabbed a bottle of water out of the fridge and walked past him, pausing in the doorway.

\"I\'m not a jailer, Spike.\" He raised an eyebrow at her as she chewed a mouthful of dehydrated food product and rinsed it down with a swallow of water.

\"Then what are you?\" She winked at him.

\"A cowboy.\" He followed suit and grabbed a bottle of water, munching just as eagerly on his food as he ever had when Jet served dinner on Bebop. Stray\'s have to take advantage of each meal, they never know when or if the next is coming. They munched in companionable silence, broken only by the sleepy beeps of the ship\'s computer. Spike stared at the swirly screen, and leaned back against the railing.

\"You\'re doing pretty good for a kid.\" Ed nodded and dropped into her hammock.

\"You\'re doing pretty good for a dead guy.\" There, she\'d said it. He hadn\'t used her name since she\'d found him, and she was beginning to wonder if he even recognized her. With a foot hanging over the edge and trailing down to the console, Ed stared up at the ceiling.

\"And this is the part where you try and take advantage of me so you can steal my ship.\" Spike choked on a laugh, and began patting down his pockets in that familiar habit of his, searching for a cigarette. She watched as he produced yet another crumpled nearly useless bit of paper and nicotine and stubbornly lit it, taking a deep drag, and blowing the smoke out over the room. The scrubbers caught the smoke and spit back out the clean air. Ed rolled over and just watched. In with the smoke out with the smoke, the whirr of little machines. It was like he did it purposefully to annoy the scrubbers. She lazily considered making them somewhat intelligent, just because it would be funny to watch them zap some of her more obnoxious passengers, and then decided against it. Machines with personality tended to get a bit troublesome after a while, and frankly she just wasn\'t always in the mood to be patient with them. After a bit he spoke, his voice barely audible over hum of the ship.

“Jet?\" She rolled back to the ceiling with a suppressed sigh at the name.

\"He\'s fine. He\'s Jet you know. Only happy when he\'s miserable and hacking up shrubs.\" Silence. Inhale. Exhale. Whirr.

\"So the shrew came back to him then?\" Ed nodded at the ceiling.

“She still gets in trouble, but he notices her. That’s what counts.\"

\"Counts?\"

\"Yep, being noticed. It\'s what matters. She\'s made her mark on someone, and he gripes and complains but he gripes and complains about her.\"

\"Lucky broad.\" Inhale. Exhale.

\"He get you this boat?\" Ed sat upright.

\"This is MINE. I bought her six months after... with my first Bil.\" Spike choked.

\"Your first what?\" She smiled at him.

\"My first billion. I kinda lost track after 6. I just kinda keep it spread around to find later when I need it.\" He blinked at her dumbly.

\"You can\'t be more than...\" he trailed off trying to figure out what she couldn\'t be, and stared around him. \"And this? It’s hardly the life of a billionaire.\" She shrugged and slid out of the hammock until she was sitting on the console, perched like some bizarre bird of prey.

\"I like it. It makes me happy.\" He continued to blink as the cigarette burned away, forgotten and barely grasped between his lips.

“Happy?\"

\"I\'m free. I can do what I please, be where I please when I please, and sometimes I get to beat people up for no good reason.\" She leaned forward with a conspiratorial smile and said in a staged whisper. \"And sometimes, they even pay me for it.\" Spike seemed to be really struggling to grasp this little revelation and it pleased her an inordinate amount. With a laugh she threw herself onto the floor next to him and propped her head up on her hands while he sputtered quietly.

\"A hobby?\" he finally managed and she nodded.

\"It\'s a lot of fun usually.\" She frowned at the floor. \"It\'s kinda lonely though.\" He gestured around the room with his dead cigarette.

\"You have your computer stuff... though...\" Ed shook her head.

\"Not the same. Computers only tell you what you want them to, and even then, it\'s just you talking to yourself.\" Spike hauled himself to his feet and began pacing around the cabin floor.

\"Let me get this straight; you\'re a billionaire, cowboy for a hobby, and you\'re lonely?\" She nodded and sat up.

\"Silly huh? All this stuff and no one to talk to.\"

\"There\'s Jet,\" Spike began and Ed shook her head.

\"Nope,\" she said with finality. She\'d tried talking to Jet a year ago, and it had ended badly with him telling her what to do and her crashing the Bebop into one of Gaynmede\'s many oceans.

\"I won\'t insult you with asking about Faye,\" he began and she nodded gravely.

\"I appreciate that.\" He stopped his pacing and stared down at her as if seeing her for the first time.

\"You\'re doing pretty good for yourself, Ed.\" She grinned.

\"Thank you, Spike.\"

\"So what were you going to do with me?\" He was moving too casually, and she laughed at the question as much as his obvious attempt to maneuver the situation in his favor.

\"Hadn\'t decided yet, probably turn you in,\" she paused at his indignant snort. \"But you see someone put a price on your head…a big one.\" Spike nodded, and continued his too casual perusal of the console and doorways. He paused and turned back.

“How much?\" From the floor she did a somersault and landed sitting in front of her screen. With a few flicks of her fingers she brought up the bounty page. Spike leaned over her shoulder, squinting at the screen and whistled quietly. \"Well, shit.\" She nodded and turned so she was facing him.

\"So what will you do Spike? It\'s gotta be taken care of, but you know that. They\'ll just keep sending people after you until you come to them again.\" He glared at her suddenly and she glared right back. Turning around, he walked away from the screen, arms carelessly flying out.

\"The syndicate is gone, there\'s no one left.\"
\"Then it\'s someone else.\" He nodded.

\"Yeah.\"

\"So…\" she drummed her fingers on the console, and then gave up. \"There\'s a bed through that door, three doors down past the hallway. The bathroom is the only door on the right that opens.\" She turned back to the screen. \"Goodnight, Spike.\"

As he weaved his way through the pitch black corridor, it occurred to him once more, that he was on Ed\'s ship. Ed the strange monkey girl genius who had likely been the smartest one out of all of them, and got out while the getting was good. He rammed his weight against a door, and was relieved to feel it give a bit. It could have been a closet, but somehow it managed to hold a shower stall a sink and a toilet. He still stank of that planet, of those miners, of that job. He ran the water ‘till it was icy and splashed it over his face and neck. He hadn\'t liked it this odd sense of decency that popped up at inopportune moments, and that last job had rankled that particular bit of him. Robbery is robbery, mischief was just a cheap thrill and killing, well…someone always had to die right? That\'s just the way the game was played. He\'d woken up a John Doe on a godforsaken rock the ISSP must\'ve sent him to, no one wanting to claim or clean up the mess he\'d just created. The Syndicate was destroyed, the building cold ashes and he was stuck. For a year or two he just bummed it, until someone looked him up, asked... someone always did. It should bother him more that all he was good for was mob dirty work. He didn\'t have the drive or ambition to be something in a mob, but he was good, damn good, and in the grand scheme of it all, it meant nothing. She had still died.

He turned the shower on full blast letting the hot needles of water pierce his skin. The memory of Julia barely haunted him now. It was as if her death had been his wake up call. His dream had ended then and she, along with the syndicate and Vicious, had just faded into the background of sleep, swept aside as just a nightmare so he could get on with his life. The water ran over his hair, plastering it to his head, and he shook off the gloomy mood threatening to drag him back down into depression that he had no use for. He turned his thoughts back to his captor, to little Ed. There was nothing little about her any more. It was nice that she\'d stopped referring to herself in third person, it made conversation with her so much easier. He could still remember conversations with her on the Bebop that had him so confused, and all because of her odd grasp of language. He imagined a good deal of it came from a nonexistent father who didn\'t have enough common sense to teach his daughter how to speak properly, but now was hardly the time to think about such things. She had definitely grown up. Her red hair was still a wild, tangled mess, but shorter and closer cropped which emphasized her elfin features. Her eyes were the same, and she still had the somewhat childlike face. Her body was still tiny, though not childlike. He had seen the curves, and appreciated them way more than he was comfortable admitting to himself. A particular part of his anatomy woke up enough to express his opinion of the girl\'s attributes and Spike gave himself a shake. She was still just a kid for Christ sake, easily 15 years younger than him. Spike shut the water off with a snap. She had her own ship, and a few billion woolongs to spare, and was a bounty hunter because it made her happy. As he hunted around the closet of a bathroom for a towel he smirked. It seemed that she had a better grip on life than he ever did.

Giving up on his search for a towel, he decided that the best option, although rather grungy, would be to just dress, being somewhat modest, until he found his room. This plan was hindered only by the absence of his clothes. He was fairly certain he\'d left them on the floor, and it wasn\'t like there were many places for them to hide. Had she snuck in while he was showering? Not likely, he\'d have heard her. With a sinking feeling in his stomach he remembered exactly who’s ship this was and groaned. He grabbed a piece of toilet paper and dropped it on the floor. He watched somewhat impassively as a small metal arm snaked out from one of the many cabinets and snatched it up. Had it trashed his clothes? He shook his head and wished he had a cigarette.

Now came the really embarrassing part. He was quite naked, wet, somewhat cold, and wasn\'t exactly sure which room was his. He could just walk out and keep trying doors, but it was the principle of the matter now. He felt somewhat responsible for Ed, even though she was in fact taking care of him in a manner of speaking, and it seemed... well wrong, to be traipsing around her ship stark naked. Well, he decided, she could have avoided this embarrassment if only she had properly stocked her bathroom with towels. Spike took a deep breath, opened the bathroom door and found himself in a pitch black hallway. Hands outstretched he found the other wall, and began the somewhat tedious walk, counting doorways. Had she said third after the hallway, or third in the hallway? He sure as hell wasn\'t walking back to ask. Not with the dismissal he\'d just received and certainly not with hands as his only decency. He found the third doorway and put his weight against it. The door snicked open and he found himself in a dark room of sorts, which seemed to be a definite plus, mainly because it was dark although this did have its drawbacks. He decided against reason to take a few steps into the room and check for the bed. Most ship\'s layouts were identical, at least when it came to cabins. He took two steps into the room and then slid his foot out, just enough... There! His foot hit a bunk. Carefully he felt in the dark, and found it to be covered in a blanket and sheet, and decided this was as good a place as any to pass out. With care not to knock anything that could possibly be breakable over he crawled onto the bed and under the covers. How long had it been since he slept on a ship? He lay there in darkness, listening to the artificial hum of the air vents, and was lulled to sleep by the gentle vibration of flight.