Chapter Text
She had tripped black ICE. Frantically, desperately, she deployed countermeasures - screaming for help from her team - but they had scattered and disconnected. Trembling, nerves on fire, she fought on.
She was limping, cradling the mangled remains of her jaw and her hanging tongue. She blindly pushed her way through the side exit, through to a back alley. She could hear the hollering and hooting of Maelstrom gangers behind her, as they shot up the dead bodies of her team - her friends - for sport.
She emerged from her netrunning tub, gasping. Her feed had shown that the NCPD was sneaking up through the building’s stairwell - they’d been sold out by one of their own. Silently, without notifying the others in the next room, she threw on her coat and rappelled down the fire escape. As she reached the bottom, she heard the sound of gunfire erupt from the window.
Time to find a new team.
Blearily, Kiwi opened her eyes. The dull gray ceiling of her apartment greeted her like an old friend. And something cold was dabbing at her forehead.
“Water,” she rasped. “Cig.”
“Kiwi!” Lucy’s voice. Dizzily, Kiwi could feel herself being sat upright, and a straw pressing against her lips. She sipped at it greedily.
“Cig?” she pleaded, in between gulps of water.
Lucy half sighed, half chuckled. “I honestly don’t know if you’re kidding or not. But no, Kiwi. Not until you can walk on your own. Might mess with your meds.”
Her eyes refocused, and she could see Lucy now - barely. The bright white bob of hair was actually throwing off some of the contrast and gamma settings, as her optics struggled to recalibrate from their days-long sleep mode.
She rubbed her eyes, and gave the software a quick figurative kick in the butt. The images sharpened, and she could finally see Lucy’s face, impassive as always. But Kiwi could see her fingers clenched tightly around the glass.
“Two days?” whispered Kiwi. That’s what her biometrics were showing her. That, and also the fact that she was still running a low fever. Her broken arm was in a cast, and her ribs had been set and bandaged.
“Yes, two days since we robbed Arasaka.” Lucy placed the glass of water back onto her nightstand. “You lost a lot of blood, not to mention the fractures in your arms and ribs. The ripper managed to fix you up, but said you needed rest.”
“Couldn’t be that… bad, you guys already brought me home.”
“Could definitely have been worse. With what we made off of Faraday’s commission, we had more than enough to spare for your care and meds. But you never get hurt as much as this, Kiwi. This the first time I’ve seen you so…”
Kiwi croaked out a passable approximation of a laugh. “You haven’t known me for long enough. Getting hurt used to be my thing, all the time. I’ve just gotten better at avoiding it recently.”
A small smile appeared on Lucy’s lips. “Don’t want to get a set of monowires like mine? Could have helped you when the corpo was trying to cut your head off.”
“God no. That means Maine will just think of more reasons to put me on the frontlines. ‘Sides, was never good at close quarters. Not a netrunner thing.”
“...Wasn’t it you that told me to pick something up for close quarters defense?” asked Lucy, bemused.
“Yes, you. So I wouldn’t have to.” Kiwi brought her cast up to a more comfortable position. “Speaking of which, I have a ‘told you so’ lined up for our searches on Vincent. I ‘told you so’ that the data we found was fishy. That the epitome of dullness we found couldn’t have been correct.”
“Oh? Congratulations then. How do you feel now that you’ve been proven right?”
Kiwi looked over her body, heavily bandaged. Felt the pounding in her head.
“Pain, mostly.”
A notification buzzed at the edge of her field of view, and Kiwi accessed it, switching to the feed from the main doors of the building. David was downstairs, holding two large bags. Looking around, tapping his foot as he waited.
Lucy could apparently access the feed as well. With a quick few lines of code, she opened the doors and allowed him access to the building. Kiwi watched as David waved at the camera and walked in with a skip in his step.
“How did you even get access to my apartment?” Kiwi muttered.
“The keycard in your wallet, obviously,” said Lucy, adjusting her hair absently. “Oh no, I know that look Kiwi. Now’s not the time.”
Kiwi gave her a long-suffering look. “I’m just saying, Lucy. That after all this, I’ll be reconfiguring my keycard access. Know why?”
“You could hack me into a sparking wreck if you wanted to, why are you even worried?”
Not anymore, thought Kiwi. With how fucking good you are, it hasn’t been the case for a long time . But aloud she said, “It’s the principle of things. Know why?”
Lucy groaned. “Alright, because ‘we can’t trust anybody’. Happy?”
Kiwi sat back into her pillows, making herself comfortable. “And don’t you forget it. Now, let your boytoy in. I think he grabbed us lunch.”
Lucy stood up with a frown. “Don’t even joke about that, David hates my guts. Can’t blame him either, I strung him along like a fish for the entire day straight after his mother died –”
“Then apologize to him, or kiss him silly. God, I’m not supposed to be your teacher anymore. Now go. Shoo!”
Lucy rolled her eyes and left the room with a quiet huff. As she went, Kiwi looked through her bedroom door and noticed that her mess of an apartment had actually been tidied up. Lucy had not been idle when Kiwi had been sleeping.
The outside door opened with a familiar creak, and Kiwi could hear voices drift through her apartment. It honestly felt… awful to have so many people in her apartment at once. It was her bastion, her fortress, her sanctuary. But she pushed that feeling aside. Having the confidence to invite them in also projected certainty in her skills, that she could deal with all of them if she had a mind to. And that kind of image meant a lot in edgerunner circles. Heck, some people still believed that Morgan Blackhand was alive, even after a nuke went off between his legs. So much so that they still hadn’t made a drink for him in the Afterlife.
“Hey Kiwi,” said David as he entered the bedroom, gingerly stepping over a heavy cable. “Good to see you’re awake. Doing OK?”
“Not so bad, actually. Would be even better if you brought a packet of cigarettes–”
David brightened and reached a hand into his bag, which was promptly slapped away by Lucy.
“Not until she gets off her meds. And aren’t you seventee– you know what, stupid thought. No one checks for SINs over here in Kabuki,” Lucy grabbed the pack of cigarettes herself, and pocketed it. She then rifled through the bags that David had carried in. “What’ll it be, Kiwi? Burritos, stir-fry ramen, Synth meat Donburi, that nutrient shake you always drink… my my David, you brought a lot.”
“She did take a shot for the team,” said David with a smile. “And with the gig done, this is the first time I’ve had this much disposable cash. Seemed like a preem time to splurge!”
Huh. Kiwi felt like she understood why Lucy let her guard down around the kid - overgrown puppy, that one. He was the type to sell himself on the streets and be overjoyed to hear that his kindly pimp was making good money off him.
“Faraday actually followed up with his side of our contract, despite our fuck up?” Kiwi asked as she reached over to take the nutrient shake. She checked her accounts mentally, and indeed saw a thick stack of eddies transferred in just yesterday. Her share of the profits.
“Ha! Maine was actually calling for more.” After a bit of back and forth, David settled on the burrito while Lucy chose the ramen. With a mouthful of food, he continued. “Said that the man’s intel was crappy, that we walked into a counter ambush with Arasaka ninjas coming out of the woodworks. Lots of arguing, but eventually they settled on the original contract, with the promise that we’d stay on Tanaka’s tail. The nav data helped but isn’t all that useful now, now that Arasaka knows we’ve got it.”
Lucy glanced over at Kiwi. “Does that mean we might face Vincent again?”
“Doubtful,” Kiwi replied. “If you think we fucked up, our mistakes pale in comparison to what V’s facing. The only way it could have gone worse was if Tanaka was there and had gotten a bullet to the head. Not a lot of corpos can walk away from that kind of fiasco and retain their position. I’d be surprised if he wasn’t deep fried and tossed into the bay.”
Lucy shook her head. “With our luck, they’ll assign someone even worse as a replacement,” she mused.
“Worse than that decked out ‘saka ninja? Doesn’t get much more dangerous than that. At that point they might as well enlist Maxtac as a 24 hour security detail,” said Kiwi. She took a sip from her straw. Urgh, having a tongue while drinking this shake was a bad idea. She should have switched back to her mask-filter.
A flash of guilt passed over David’s face. “Should I have stayed in the diner? Maine later told me that a Sandevistan might have been able to counter his Kerenzikov’s speed.”
“Maine was ribbing you,” said Kiwi pointedly. “Not to put you down, but you’ve been in this business for what, a few weeks? He would have taken you apart. Your milspec Sandivistan is great against your average night city hooligan, but it has ways of being countered. Or are you forgetting the previous owner?”
David nodded slowly. “Yeah, saw a BD- I mean, heard he got flatlined by Maxtac. Hacked through his ICE, disabled his cyberware”
“One method among many.” She took another sip. “Argh, screw it. Lucy, could you grab my mask? Not designed for taste buds, this.”
Kiwi unhooked her faceplate, enjoying the aghast expression on David’s face at the sight of her facial cavity. Never got old.
Lucy sighed in exasperation and passed over the donburi. “Then eat something that is designed for taste buds, you drama queen. Might as well since David already bought it.”
“Fiiiine.” Kiwi replaced her face plate with a click, and engaged the locks.
It was oddly… pleasant. Eating real food, hearing the two youngsters bantering back and forth, offering some of her own advice when the occasion called for it. Lucy was apparently taking David out for runs; Kiwi raised her eyebrows at her protege when David wasn’t looking. Lucy snorted and looked away, but the tips of her ears were slightly pink.
Kiwi was half tempted to launch into another lecture on “not trusting anyone”, but loathe for her to admit, David was probably one of the safest people in Night City to actually trust further than you could throw. Still, she would keep an eye out - honestly, Lucy was too good for him.
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With the meds, it took two more days for her ribs to stitch back together, and another two more until she could breathe deeply without wincing. She attended the traditional afterparty at Turbo’s Bar now that she had “gotten better”, and watched Pilar juggle a dozen flashbangs. Their on and off getaway driver Falco had turned up as well, and the two men coerced David into going to Lizzy’s with them at a later date.
Kiwi had a sneaking suspicion that David was more of a connoisseur of BDs than either of the men knew, but kept quiet.
Her arm remained in its cast. Her unpleasant meeting with the bar table had shattered the bones there into shards, and even the wonders of modern medicine required more time than just a week.
But she wasn’t an invalid anymore, and she had shooed Lucy and David away from their caretaker duties. The old comfort of being alone in her apartment soothed her, and she fell into her usual routine. Netrun for Maine - shop a bit for necessities - drink shakes whenever hungry - sleep. Her current task was checking for more ways to catch Tanaka himself, using the limo’s nav data to guess at the man’s activities.
This morning, she had emerged from her den in search of a new pack of nutrient shakes and potentially some new clothes. The old set that she wore during the mission was so soaked in blood, and torn enough ways that it resembled modern art.
Something cheap, she mused. That fit with her coat. As she browsed through a rack of shirts, she thought she might as well see if she could find some new, interesting code for her cyberdeck as well. There was a decent dealer on the upper decks of the complex.
Her idle thoughts stopped dead as she felt the chill of cold metal pressed against the base of her spine. Her heart leapt into her throat, and she drew in a shuddering gasp.
“So, Keira ,” came the voice behind her. “I was looking to have a little chat.”
She tried to keep her voice steady.
“Hello, V.”