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You think you get to a certain point, you finally lose all sense of touch.
All sense of feeling.
Like drying ice-cold water off your barely human skin, you scrape the last remnants of sensation off your mind and soul, and return to the universe associations you no longer care for.
But much like humanity can’t give up on philosophy no matter how drastically and aggressively it keeps moving forward and no matter how old the very concept of philosophy is, old enough for some to consider it obsolete, body and soul can’t lose their sense of touch, either, unless so violently ripped from them, that there’ll be hardly anything left to realize what had happened.
Bare soles on an unshared shared home.
The lights of Night City seem to send a blessing to the one who’d named this place like that. A city that is grotesque and gruesome no matter what time of day, but only this eerily beautiful when the sky turns black and starts drinking up all the neon the city produces.
This is a city that belongs to the night, as much as the night belongs to the city.
Secret whispers and secret touches, violent hands roaming bodies unclaimed, a dungeon with no roof, a cell with no bars, wrapping itself around the confines of this place.
A few thousand years ago, who knows if anybody would have dreamed things getting this bad.
Humanity going this far.
Someone is launching themself onto the moon again.
Lucy stands in front of the window of the penthouse and watches them blast away. The rocket cuts through the sky as if it had the intention to scar. It slices through with visuals that seem rural and rudimentary compared to the slick shine and gloss of every surface in her home. It cuts at a slow pace, delights in the voiceless scream of the night sky and the rejoicing of those leaving this hellhole behind to gaze upon it from a much colder, much freer surface.
Her namesake.
She places a bare hand onto the glass.
“That moon BD you showed me was pretty sweet.”
Her reflection paints itself clear, projects her, naked to the tip of her toes, drenched in ice-cold water, half-reeling from a job she didn’t care for, from a job she shouldn’t have done, for a job she’s already forgetting, pushing aside, pushing back, ripping off of her, throwing it off and away like a fluorescent jacket.
Blood-stained.
There’s a slight chuckle in his voice when he says it. He believes it, that’s always been the most atrocious part of listening to David speak. He has faith, so atrocious and raw, never in a power higher than their own, never in the gods that run their streets, perhaps not even in himself. He believes in his heart, he believes in what is right, he believes in figuring shit out and making sure it’ll all be fine.
He isn’t as stupid as she might have tried to pretend she actually considers him to be, as much as she’d wanted him to think she thought of him to be.
He knows things don’t come for free. And he knows people die if you blink one too many times. They die if you hold on to them, and they die if you screech your lungs out begging for them to walk through a door they’ll never see the threshold of again.
The glass is thick, takes up the entire wall. She can’t hear the roaring and the fire as the passengers fade to the moon. She doesn’t need to, she knows what it sounds like.
The room is dim.
“I had something I wanted to talk about, too,” she whispers against the glass, her breath doesn’t leave stains. She hadn’t bothered with a towel. Her footprints lead upstairs. Two pale feet, lithe and dangerous, they’d never taken her far enough to escape the bitterness and iron in her mouth.
The surface of the glass feels colder than the air around her.
“Huh?”
She snorts and closes her eyes against some forgotten history’s future. He’s such an idiot. Cheerful and energetic, heart the size of the moon, ruthless, determined, driven, motivated, he’ll keep going and going and going, until people know him before he knows about them, until they recognize him from far away and whisper about him, until they want him dead or want to be him.
Or want to hire him.
Or want to break him.
Or want him.
And then he’ll look and sound as if barely any older than…
Well.
She presses her forehead against the window.
“I wasn’t lying.” Maybe it would have been better if it hadn’t been. Wouldn’t it have been convenient, easier, if she’d kept up the lie. If it had been a lie. If she hadn’t cared, if they’d worked together as…
Oh, it was simultaneously so much more difficult and so much easier to just give in. He looks at you as if he doesn’t care to understand why you’d walk away from something he considers to be good, as if he considers her to be foolish, for not loving freely. Crude in a brand of honesty that doesn’t even come across as anything harsher than a confused stare.
“It was the first time I told anyone,” her voice grows quieter.
“That’s good. I didn’t want to think you were lying.”
Why had he said that?
She knows why he’d said that, she’s not fucking stupid, but how can someone with a brain like his exist? With a filter between it and his mouth that he seems to operate at his own discretion, as if being that honest was a smart idea in the world they lived in. As if admitting to things like that was easy. As if it were right, as if 'feeling' was right and righteous and as if the world needed to burn down before he’d even consider allowing someone to rip it away from him, to rip his heart out of him, that load of bullshit of actually giving a shit.
“What if I’m lying now?” He’d stared at her, and she hadn’t been able to look back at him. He’d always been braver than her, hadn’t he. From the first moment on, from the first time they spoke, from the moment they locked eyes, from the moment he spewed and spewed and cared.
“I don’t think you are.”
The laughter she chokes out lasts no more than a second, it’s wet and raw and shaky and cuts through her throat, she can’t bear to open her eyes and she can’t bear to cry and she can’t bear to say the next line. This isn’t even the furthest she’s gotten before she started longing for a short circuit frying her insides, keeping her alive for as long as possible, conscious for as long as possible, burning her, cutting her up, freezing her at the same time, while his voice played on repeat.
Sometimes she starts out like that.
Sometimes it becomes… sometimes she looks at the replay of him and manages to have it soothe her heart.
Sometimes she makes it halfway through before she crumbles.
Sometimes she makes it halfway through before she screams.
“’Cause I don’t like that.”
She chuckles.
“… Crazy…” she whispers. Her hand curls into a fist, nails scraping against her window until her knuckles begin sliding down, following her body’s descent onto the cold, inhuman, familiarly foreign floor.
“You should have said something earlier.”
He’s sitting cross-legged in this memory, and his eyes carry no judgement. She feels judged either way, judged by someone who cares to figure out her ‘because’s to all his ‘why’s, not to hold a gun against her temple or force a plug into her mind, but to figure out how it looks like when she runs and what pace he might have to pick up to be able to stay at her side.
She couldn’t.
“Why not?”
“You were so mad at me…” the last word fades into a higher pitch, fades into the sob she’s choking back, swallowing like broken glass; the sound she used to hate so, a display of weakness she can’t afford, nothing in this world is worth the price of reminding people her tear conducts still work, her heart still works.
“I wasn’t mad.”
Oh, he was. Why wouldn’t he have been. Honestly, she would have thought him fucking insane if he hadn’t been.
“I wasn’t mad, just…”
She adores the way he laughs. A small chuckle, full laughter, open-mouthed or barely there, maybe just a smile with some air to accompany the idea of humour, maybe optimism he didn’t actually possess. No matter the genre, he still knew how to smile.
Yeah, maybe he had been insane.
“Well, yeah. Guess I was…”
She laughs again, breathy, and small, her forehead is pressed onto her hands now, pressing into her knuckles as if she could somehow use her bones to shatter her skull by just being desperate enough to consider it. Isn’t this position for children? Curled up in a ball on the floor?
Hadn’t she outgrown being a child aeons ago?
“I was angry, but… I wasn’t pissed at you.”
Always in the right place, always candid.
“Wouldn’t have saved you if-” Liar.
She knows it by heart. She knows them all by heart. She knows them better than the back of her stupid fucking hands, better than any corner of the Net she’d destroyed on her way here, any brain she’d fried from the inside, any chip she’d burst within her. She knows them better than her insides, better than he’d known the deepest crevices of her heart and every softest corner of her body.
You’re the kind of guy who’ll jump into fire to save someone, even if you get burned.
She could recite them deaf, dumb, blind. She could recite them without a voice and without a mind.
But this part…
You’re that type.
“Is that why you think I won’t make it?”
She makes a sound she can’t acknowledge, she can’t understand. It’s high and in the back of her throat, as if her voice can’t make it any further than that. A sob being stabbed to death, the shock yelp of her pain when the bile of her stomach reaches it and starts burning it alive, the squeak of trying to hold her breath to avoid sobbing out loud.
No, it’s not that, she’d said. You’d make a good edgerunner, she’d said, why hadn’t she just taken a gun to his head instead? Why had she been honest, why had he constantly ripped that out of her, truth after truth, why had he been so safe to be raw in front of, why did he want her truths, why hadn’t she had the guts to simply rip the sky down and have it come crashing onto her, or find something, anything else to say here.
“So, what’s the problem?”
“I didn’t want you to be one,” she sobs through her parted lips and through her teeth onto the already wet skin of her clutched hands.
“I didn’t want you to die,” she howls as quietly as a beaten child smart enough to understand if it cries too loudly, it’ll hurt more, it’ll be hit more; she howls into her skin, she whimpers into the floor, repeats it like a prayer in a godless world, as if he’s standing before her, and she’s begging, begging, begging at his feet, to not do that again, to forgive her for not having kept him alive.
For not having destroyed his resolve enough to repair his life.
She hadn’t wanted him to become another name, another whisper, another fucking drink at the Afterlife.
It wasn’t the life or the end he’d deserved.
Her rejections had been meek and hardly so, she rebutted his rebuttals with the willpower of someone who’d already given in, was gently trying to convince herself she was actually trying to convince him, but he’d already taken her heart, she’d already unlocked her chest and gently placed it in his hands, she’d already seen him cradle it as if precious enough to be held.
Why had she fought?
Why hadn’t she fought enough? Harder? Why hadn’t she bitten and clawed his love apart enough to push him a little closer to the other side of the line, the one he might have lived on? A few more years, barely, but a few more years, either way?
She draws her hands up, presses them against the back of her head. She clutches her hair as she had back then, but she’d been frustrated then to have lost and won already, now she’s just trying to rip it all out, scraping her scalp, digging her fingers between the strands of her hair.
She killed him.
“I’ll take you to the moon!”
The scream that tears itself out of her throat feels like the dying, rage-filled roar of a beast made up of nothing but mutilated limbs and grief. Like a heap of her former self, a mound of gore with a maul protruding from it, trapped by her own decaying body, on fire and trapped under ice just as burning.
Ferocious and mourning, she screams wordless insults and pleads, vows to kill everything and nothing, vows to exact revenge by doing the right thing, vows to exact revenge by burning it all down, down to the ground, leaving behind nothing of what had been her home for only that brief amount of time David had been in her life.
The visual of a beast gurgling guts and roaring, raging, vowing.
She slams her fists onto the floor and screams, and roars, and rages, and vows.
His voice has already cut off.
She could never fully bear to listen to that part, to listen to any of them to the end.
What if they’d fade away if she did?
She hadn’t wanted him to die. She hadn’t wanted him to step any closer to her life than what use he might have offered during those very first moments. Maybe amusement, curiosity had done it. At first, maybe, the pity of the already broken towards the whole.
Which she’d misunderstood, he probably knew how unjust life was about as intimately as the rest of them, he probably knew very well what missing pieces felt like.
A world full of augmentations, and they’re all just walking around with metal scraps detaching from their minds.
But he hadn’t been shattered, not fully, not yet. He was a beacon of light, he was the Earth in all his glory, his beauty, the gold beneath his surface, the bright lights of his smile, the destroyed nature of the scars littering his body, and the pure, raw, sound of life beating away steadily in his chest.
Life.
That’s what he’d been.
And she’d dragged him in and dragged him down and killed the only thing good she’d found worth killing and dying for.
She lifts her head.
Yesterday's future reflects on her skin. She soars high up above the city, rich enough and coddled, that the lights of cars and billboards can’t touch her directly. Yet, she still feels scorched, in a way. Blisters that she’d ignored ever since she’d made it out, scar tissue that never learnt how to properly form, bumpy and difficult to touch, turned into holy scriptures to trace and memorise every time he’d taken her into his arms, every time he’d sat so close and not quite close enough, every time she’d sighed and succumbed fully into his chest, every time he’d run his hands along her skin, kissed her where she needed it most, kissed her where she hadn’t thought to ask, kissed her where she’d demanded he do, and he’d concede, with that smile of his, as if pretending to be mundane and alive was his favourite thing to do, as long as it was with her.
She sits back on her heels.
The apartment is silent.
It always is.
She barely spends any time in it, anymore.
She’s seen Earth from above, she’s stepped onto the moon’s surface with her own actual two feet, stood in the midst of semi-uncharted territory and thought, well, yeah, I made it, I did it indeed.
A hollow realization, she’d achieved it, by giving up what, exactly?
Then she’d seen his silhouette.
Framed against Earth, against life, stood life itself.
And she killed him.
They killed him.
He killed him .
She’d thought if David had ever encountered enough people in his life that maybe people more than whispered about him, maybe someone out there had a few echoes of him left somewhere, in their mind, on a chip, on data collected for god knows what reason.
She’d wondered how much of him was still stuck in that fucking Sandevistan.
Oh well.
She’d find out soon enough.
She stands up, slowly as if she had the time to spare, or simply as if she were trying to avoid bursting from within, as if she was still lying upstairs, making some assholes out there suddenly wish, after decades, that perhaps not all that exists rested in a virtual place so accessible to a woman as vengeful as her.
A Sandevistan like that, with a history like that, is sure to fall into the wrong hands.
Everybody wanted it, had from the first moment on.
She knows the names and faces of some who’d wanted it with him.
She sees the tower’s silhouette every time she blinks.
All she needed was the right corner of the Net to figure out which suit it had splattered onto, and get it back.
And then she’ll burn this entire fucking city to the ground.
I promise.