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bebopcrew · 9 months ago

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Beboptober 2024 Day 3: Luck

Thanks to @bebopcrew for the prompt list! I've also put my Beboptober stories for this year on AO3 here!

This story takes place during the beginning of Session 11, "Toys in the Attic."

“And that’s fifteen games in a row I’ve won,” Faye said, accepting the book that a scowling Jet handed her and putting it among her pile of other winnings. A smile played about her lips. “I guess luck is on my side today.”

Jet narrowed his eyes. “You’re full of shit.”

“Am I?” Faye said lightly. “Or is it you who just can’t accept an unfortunate losing streak? That’s not very honorable of you, Jet.”

“I am honorable,” said Jet. “But when an honorable man makes fifteen wrong guesses at the dice game and doesn’t win once, and he loses everything he owns, he tends to want to make sure he’s on an even playing field.”

“What are you implying?” Faye gasped, knowing perfectly well what Jet was implying.

“I’m saying that maybe it’s time I rolled these dice for a change,” he said. “My way. No tricksy business, no weird throws.”

“Fine by me.” She shrugged and handed over the dice and cup. “Although I don’t see how your way is all that different from my way.”

Jet set the dice in the cup, covered the top with his hand, and gave the cup some good, vigorous shakes—making sure to look Faye directly in the eye the whole time, so she could see he wasn’t doing any weird, trick shakes that would guarantee the dice would land on a certain number, or otherwise deliberately throwing the game. He was going to go about this fair and square, unlike some people. Or so he suspected. “We’ll see who really has all the luck here.”

“And for stakes…” Faye thought for a second. What had they not already bet? It seemed like Jet had given everything but the clothes on his ba— Suddenly she had an inspiration. “Your jacket if I win, my jacket if you do.”

“Sounds fair to me.” Jet gave a short nod, then set the cup down decisively on the table, the dice securely inside. “Now, make your guess. Which is it?”

Faye looked up, trying to appear deep in thought. “Hmmm…I think I’ll go with…evens.”

“You’re sure?” Jet said. He couldn’t help but give a derisive snort. “Your luck guiding you to that?”

“Yes, Jet, the wisdom of the ancients is guiding me in a random, time-killing dice game.” She rolled her eyes and leaned back, crossing one foot over the other. It knocked against her new gold anklet. “I’m just feeling confident today. I’m doing evens.”

“Fine,” Jet said. “Let’s see what we’ve got.” He raised the cup, peered at the dice…and his face fell. “Snake eyes. Even.”

Faye cheered—just a little, mind you; she didn’t want to gain a reputation as a sore winner or anything—as Jet reluctantly shrugged off his jacket and passed it across the table.

He shook his head. “I guess you really are that lucky.”

She smiled up at him, as innocently as possible. “Care to go double or nothing? Maybe we can bet our shoes next.”

“We’re turning this into a strip game?” Jet frowned. “I don’t want to lose any more clothing.”

“Maybe you won’t have to,” she said with a grin. “Maybe this will be the turn where you end my winning streak.”

Quick as a flash, her eyes flicked down to the gold anklet around her leg—the one that could magnetically change the roll of a die if she gave it the right twitch—then back up to Jet.

But I doubt it.

#bohemian-rhapsody-in-blue #beboptober

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bebopcrew · 9 months ago

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Beboptober 2024 Day 2: Crash

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.

“Why don’t you take it for a spin?”

#bohemian-rhapsody-in-blue #beboptober

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bebopcrew · 9 months ago

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using beboptober by @bebopcrew as a reason to finally finish some of the fics sitting in my drafts!:) been out with a migraine for the last two days, but here’s a slightly delayed fic for ‘eyes’ from day 1

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Cowboy Bebop (Anime) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Grencia Eckener & Julia Characters: Julia (Cowboy Bebop), Grencia Eckener Additional Tags: missing scene or pre-canon? idk…, Friendship, Queer Themes, My First Work in This Fandom, Beboptober (Cowboy Bebop), jupiter jazz my beloved… Summary:

Julia and Gren, a quiet moment on Callisto.

#thats-a-common-blogs-name #beboptober

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bebopcrew · 9 months ago

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Beboptober 2024 Day 1: Eyes + Introduction

Thanks to @bebopcrew for the prompt list! Am I seriously doing Beboptober on top of all the other stuff I have to do during October this year, fellowship applications (although those are mostly done and filed away for now, at least) and grad school applications and thesis work and all the normal senior-year-of-college stuff? You bet your ass I am!!! Maybe I can just call it a writing exercise, a warm-up for my thesis...and if my insomnia's going to keep me up until horrific hours anyway, I may as well do something productive with it! And even if I don't get to all 31 days, at least we can say I tried...

If anyone's interested, you can see my prompts from Beboptober 2022 here (on Tumblr) and here (on AO3). I can't wait to see what everyone comes up with this year!

His eyes were gray. It was hard to tell at a distance, small and hidden as they were under a thick brow and bushy eyebrows, and in different lighting they could be mistaken for a mousy brown or a light blue. Not that he was given to romantic descriptions of things like eye colors, or anything. He wasn’t much of a poet—not in that way, at least.

The right one had a scar running vertically through it and a metallic piece reinforcing the skin underneath. No one had ever asked about that piece, and he’d never told. It didn’t do to dwell on the past if it didn’t help you in the present. And he could still see out of both eyes just fine. In any case, he supposed the enhancements around his eye weren’t as distinctive as the metal arm, nor as clear a reminder of the betrayal in his past. Losing his arm was dramatic, something he’d never let himself forget. Getting your eye a little damaged, a little scarred? Just an occupational hazard. All part of the job.

~~~~~

Her eyes were green, sparkling like gemstones. Emeralds. She had a pair of emerald earrings—probably fakes, but they looked the part—that brought out her eyes; she’d worn them that day at the opera, when she was trying to find out about Mao Yenrai. They made her feel fancy and beautiful, the way every woman deserved to feel at least once—like a delicacy, a luxury few could afford.

She was proud of having mastered the art of seduction, especially with just her face: a well-timed eyebrow raise, or narrowing of the eyes, could make men fall all over themselves to bend to her will. It was a delicate act. Like so many parts of her life. They said the eyes were the windows to the soul, but maybe hers were more like computer screens, projecting whatever she wanted them to project—so it didn’t matter if there wasn’t anything behind them at all. Or anything that wasn’t locked away deep where she couldn’t find it, where she searched, reached out for it in desperation, and came back with her hand grasping nothing but air. She was a luxury that wasn’t accessible to many. Not even herself.

~~~~~

Her eyes were gold, as unique as she was. Gold and gigantic, practically taking up half her face, gazing out at the world with wonder, with curiosity, with an unflinching, unsettling intensity—unless, of course, they got distracted and flitted elsewhere. Because the whole world fascinated her, and she wanted to explore every nook and cranny of it, divulge its every secret.

Her eyes were gold, but they didn’t always look it—not when they were covered with her great green goggles. They reflected the text on the screen of her beloved computer as she net-dived, hacking her way through the world. Even before she’d gotten off the little shack she’d cobbled together on Earth, those goggles, that computer, were how she flew through the universe and learned all its tantalizing bits of information, all she needed to know. Maybe they weren’t quite rose-colored glasses. But they were as close to it as this crew was ever going to get.

~~~~~

His eyes were two different colors. Technically, both were brown. But the right one was slightly lighter than his left, having been replaced with a cybernetic one after he’d long ago lost the real one in an accident. People said he was an incredible marksman owing to his keen eyesight—that he could see where people were going almost before they even arrived, then move as fluidly and rapidly as water so his bullet met them there. And it was true that he rarely missed a shot; it was one of the reasons he was such a feared bounty hunter. Was it attributable to his sight, though? He didn’t know. He tried not to dwell on things like that, to just take action.

His girl, once, had said that people got a strange feeling if they kept looking straight into his eyes. He hadn’t known she’d said that until later, after everything, after he’d made an unsettled half-peace with having lost her forever. He’d heard her say it secondhand, from a man he’d met briefly on Callisto—someone who, quite unexpectedly, knew people from his past—and then lost, too. People just didn’t seem to stay in his life long. Or he didn’t stay in theirs.

Maybe that’s why he lived in the past so much. His left eye saw the past, and his right eye, the present. That was what he was really seeing, all this time. Only patches of reality. No wonder looking into his eyes apparently felt strange, disorienting—people who said that should imagine what it was like to actually live it. And no matter how much he tried not to dwell on the past, it was always there following him, always in his eyes.

#bohemian-rhapsody-in-blue #beboptober

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