Chapter Text
Life had been beautiful once, full of joy and human connection. She had her family, even some friends.
But Night City is a hungry beast, and it consumes the joy of people's lives and then shits out despair upon the unlucky survivors.
Yuri Tenma, probably one of the smartest people of her generation, even at the tender young age of eleven years old is well aware of this fact as she scrounges for food by stealing from dumpsters while hiding amongst the garbage and living in the sewers.
Hacking security protocols on dumpsters is as easy as breathing for her, and even if most of the food she eats is already half rotten it's better than laying in the trash with a howling void in her guts.
There's an cruel edge to the fact that she has the information to access both of her parents funds but has no way to spend them without revealing that she's alive, meaning she has more than enough money to live a long, happy life, but has no way to properly access it without revealing who she is.
She's in hell, looking at a heaven that laughs in her face as it remains just ever so slightly out of reach.
She clenches at her stomach as she sneaks towards one of the few places she can reliably pilfer food from, only to freeze at what she sees there.
It's a jar of pickles, fakes obviously, but still food that isn't molding or actively rotting nonetheless.
Yuri loves pickles, even if she's never eaten a real one in her entire life, they're probably the favorite part of the half-eaten, quarter rotten scop burgers that she pilfers from the dumpsters of this establishment.
She looks around owlishly, trying to find any sign of a person nearby lying in wait to snatch her up and do horrible things to her should she try to take the food seemingly left out just for her.
She approaches the jar gingerly, eyes scanning for any cameras in the area that could capture her image as she picks up the jar and scuttles away, back to her hidy-hole in the sewers.
It's only when she feels her most safe that she even dares to open the Jar, and her stomach roars with hunger as she catches the scent of the food in her hands.
To say she devours them would be a vast understatement, she eats every last one in what could only be a few minutes of ravenous consumption, gobbling them down before chugging the juice they had been stored in until the entire jar was completely empty.
For what is probably the first time since her mother's death, Yuri is full bellied and content, and she quickly slumps down onto the bed of cardboard and pilfered soft garbage to sleep off her meal.
It is only when she wakes up and begins to violently empty the contents of her stomach alongside what must be an unhealthy amount of blood that Yuri realizes that the pickles were not a kindness, but a horrible, repugnant trap.
Her nerves scream at her, her body shakes so hard she feels like she's going to fall to pieces, more and more vomit and blood explodes out of her mouth to the point that she's pretty sure that she should be dead, but something is forcing her to stay alive.
For the next week she can barely move, just enough to get a few sips of the water line she'd tapped before becoming violently sick again, delirium follows her like a specter, horrible, nightmarish visions assault her every waking moment as she teeters on the brink between life and death.
Some days Yuri only manages to hold onto her life and sanity by the atoms on the edges of her fingernails as the grim reaper dances on her digits, and some part of her wonders if she's already gone insane and just doesn't realize it yet.
But like all things this too eventually passes, as the vile poison that tries its damnedest to kill her is expunged from her body with all the slowness of a slug with clinical depression.
By the time she can get up and move again her cheeks have almost completely sunken in, her eyes are hollow and ringed by darkness, and her skin is stretched painfully taut over her rib cage.
The first thing she does is build a bomb, not a huge bomb, but one that is sure to maim whoever is unfortunate enough to come upon it in the wild, and then she sneaks it into the dumpster of the building that must house whoever it was that tried to poison her.
She smiles when she thinks about the scream that will follow the explosion the next time someone opens up that dumpster.
It is still some time after that before she will discover the use of shell companies and be able to move herself off of the streets, but it is probably one of the most memorable experiences of Yuri's life, a lesson to never completely trust again, and that nothing good comes without some price.
Yuri and J are eating together when J tilts his head in curiosity while looking at her.
"Hey Yuri, why do you hate pickles so much anyways?" he asks her with his usual catlike smile, somehow still so pure despite the fact that he's been here for some time, Yuri wants to preserve that light. "I mean, it's all made of the same stuff anyways, right?"
"I just don't like them," she responds flatly, lips only quirking up ever so slightly as the closest thing she's had to a friend in more than nineteen years rolls his eyes. "Not everything has some deep intrinsic meaning J, sometimes a person just doesn't like pickles."
J looks at her for a second before chuckling and shaking his head, "Fine, keep your secrets then," he says before going back to devouring his food.
'If only you knew all my secrets' Yuri cannot help but think. 'If only.'