Work Text:
“You look like a fuckable cut of meat. Are you?” Adam Smasher’s words sent waves of fear and revulsion through Evelyn Parker’s head. V, who could feel Evelyn’s emotions almost more intensely than her own, thanks to the raw Braindance she was diving through, would have found it the most unpleasant experience of the month, if only the pouty techie that was running the simulation hadn’t decided it would be cute to start V out with a Braindance that perfectly captured the experience of getting shot in the fucking head.
“Focus V.” Came T-bug’s voice in her ear. Easy for her to say, removed as she was from the emotional center of the braindance.
“Right.” V grit out. “Here to case the place.” She let the memory play out. Evelyn sashayed her way across the room confident that alone was enough to capture her princely mark’s attention, no matter how enthusiastically he might have been slagging his father at the time.
And V feels it’s appropriate to take a moment and just appreciate the spurned heir’s description of one of the most powerful and respected (or reviled, depending on the colors you wore) men on the planet.
“An addled despot who seeks to live forever in a walled garden where nothing changes! A monument to a world that does not exist, and may have never existed to begin with!” Damn nobody hates each other like fuckin rich families.
“Anything specific we’re looking for?” V asks T-bug while she savors the taste of Yorinobu’s expensive fucking champagne. Or…sparkling wine anyway, V is pretty sure the Champagne region still glows faintly at night. The second-or was it third? Eh, it didn't matter which one it was, none of the Corpo Wars had been kind to areas without megacorp fortifications.
“Documents. safes, hardened storage places I doubt he’s keeping the Relic on him.” T-bug replies as Evelyn uses mood music as an excuse to read the Arasaka Heir Apparent’s mail. V pauses the BD to scan all the text, Evelyn had wisely not attempted to read the emails, she’d just given herself one good look and moved on. Trusting that she, or others, could read from her memory at their leisure.
It was probably the cleverest way V had ever read someone else’s mail, which is saying something given how much of her running for the Backers was intercepting people’s mail. Usually with an eye towards finding places her family could cut a little profit from a megacorp, without being annoying enough to squash. It’s…perhaps heartening to know that even mega corp princes are still hounded by transparently scammy dick growing emails. Perhaps there’s some equality left in the world after all.
“Wait! There!” T-bug calls, directing V’s attention to a tablet that Yorinobu is stashing in his bedside table’s drawer. Evelyn only gets a brief glance at the tech specs on display before the device is hidden but that’s more than enough for V and T-bug.
“Nice! Okay it looks like we’re looking for someplace cold. Relic has to be kept chilledchill till it’s inserted.”
“Noted.” V says as she plays out the rest of the BD, and loops it back from the start.
“You look like-“ ugh nope fast forward. If Yorinobu stuffed a freezer and the relic into Smasher’s chest V is vetoing the heist anyway. This time when Evelyn makes her way to the bar V catches a glimpse of something red in the corner of Ev’s view. She pulls out of Ev’s perspective and watches the space, slowly playing the memory out in the background, the taste of champagne still teasing her tastebuds at the appropriate time. Ev begins moving away from the corner V had seen red in. V is just about to give up and rewind to try for a better view when Ev glances in the right direction.
Evelyn doesn’t see the other woman. V hadn’t seen her the first play through of the memory either, but V knows Evelyn didn’t see her cause…well Evelyn is bisexual, or at least Judy seems to think she is, and this woman is beautiful; way too beautiful to pass without reaction. She’s tall, with dark skin, her irises are golden hearts, and she’s dressed to the nines. Her generous curves are accentuated by a not quite sheer sleeveless red silk dress with the subtle armoring that only the really rich have access to. Little hearts of artificial diamonds line the dress, catching the eye even in the dim light.
“Wow.” V says “Who is she? Some Orbital Air Heiress?”
“Who is- oh fuck! Fuck V! She isn’t supposed to be real!” T-bug has more worry in her voice than V has ever heard. Probably not an exceptionally daring heiress then.
V flipped the BD to thermal scan mode as much to confirm that the woman had a heat sig as anything else. “Well she’s real, and she’s standin right next to a cooler that matches the Relic’s specs.”
“Of course she is.” T-bug sighs.
“Another woman? Ev didn’t mention anyone else being at the apartment.” Judy, the cute techie with the…interestingthe…interisting …abrasive understanding of subtlety, cut in.
“T-bug…” V is all for pacing reveals for effect but there was a bit too much worry in T-bug’s voice for V to be comfortable with the stretching silence.
“To make a long bloody story very short. Lately there’s been talk about new players. Maybe a rogue AI, maybe an independent, or a new corpo boogyman. Honestly I thought she was made up. Sharpshooter fallacy writ large.”
“Haven’t heard anything about a new boogyman.” V says. Sure she’s been a bit distracted, and totally cut off from the sources she’d cultivated back in her Backer days, but someone flatlining enough people to get that sort of reputation should not have been the kind of thing she missed. Really it was the only thing she was sure she wouldn’t miss.
“She’s not like Smasher. Doesn’t leave corpses in her wake, at least not ones she directly made, but when she’s involved things have a way of getting complicated.” The fear in T-bug’s voice wars against V’s- admittedly very gay- brain’s insistence that the woman’s smile as she toasts Ev and V is friendly and encouraging. More, it even seems genuine.
“Complicated for who?” V asks. “Complicated could be good, long as it’s not complicating our end.”
“Not the time. Not the place. V.” T-bug reproaches. “I’ll call Dex he…needs to know.”
“Right.” V says to the empty air.
Left alone in another woman’s memory, with the taste of champagne on her lips, V ponders what kind of game the bronze bangled beauty could possibly be playing, and whether or not she really wanted to get involved in it.
Fuck that. She wanted no part of it.
But Jack…
She pulled herself out of the BD, offering sincere thanks to the BD techie. “Really Judy, couldn’t’ve done it without you.” Still V accepts the BD wreath- clever way of minimizing Judy’s exposure should this all turn bloody- and allows herself to be ushered out.
The sight of gold eyes smiling invitingly from the shadows stayed with V long after the itching in the back of her skull faded.
—-----------------------------------------------
“Fuuuuuuck me..!” Jackie swore under his breath. It was the quietest V’d heard her big friend speak, but it was way too fucking loud in the moment. The crystal of the column she shared with Jackie as last ditch hiding spot in Yorinobu’s tastefully fuckin minimalist penthouse was far from soundproof. She had, after all, just heard Saburo Fucking Arasaka’s last gasping attempts at breath through the fucking screen.
Yorinobu was pacing around as if he also couldn’t believe what his hands had just done. Every second V was sure he’d look up and spot them, or his corpo-princeling ears would hear her heart beat if she didn’t time it with his footsteps. Yorinobu’s strength failed at the same time as Jackie’s nerves.
“That’s it.” He whispered like thunder as Yorinobu collapsed onto a table to sit with his head in his hands. “We’re done for.”
V’s about to take refuge in badlands humor, say something like At least it can’t get worse. When everything gets so much worse.
Someone starts clapping, their rhythm slow and dignified. The perfect cadence of upper class politeness, so why’s V get the impression it’s sarcastic?
“Ahh the classics. To cultivate immortality through children, only to turn from them to grasp instead for an arcane solution. With not a care taken to shield one from the other. It could have ended no other way.”
It’s V’s turn to shatter the silence with a whispered “Fuck. T-bug that woman in red just walked in.”
“You’re sure it’s Calamity?” T-bug asked.
“She was hard to forget, even before I knew her name was Calamity.” V hissed “The fuck kinda name is that anyway?”
“Who are you?” Yorinobu demanded in Japanese, rising to his feet. “And what foolishness has possessed you to trespass here?”
“Folly of the oldest breed is my business.” Calamity responded in the same, switching effortlessly from English to Japanese in a perfect upper-Tokyo accent. “I have had many names, and Names besides. Calamity will suffice for tonight. But you may also consider me a bit of an admirer.” Her slight bow of appreciation at the last theatrically ended in a pointed nod to the recent corpse.
“Though that was clumsily done.” She spoke with disapproval thick enough that it crossed the language barrier, judging from Jackie’s wince. “At least you arranged the set dressing well. But I’m curious. What do you plan to do next?”
The woman walked as she spoke. Confident, unbothered, casual as if she owned the place, but was considering firing the building manager for letting too much dust in with the wind. Her steps brought her to where she could lounge against the lizard enclosure. Which she did, while idly flipping through a book Yorinobu had left on the enclosure. Yorinobu, tracking the unknown woman, mirrored her movements until his back entirely faced the screen pillar that she and Jackie were crammed in.
“I have no interest in explaining myself to one so removed from the matter at hand.” He stalled.
“It’s a half measure then.” The woman sighed in disappointment. “Pity. Those can get so expensive. One never learns the price of hesitation painlessly.”
“You know not of what you speak.” Yorinobu ground out through rage clinched teeth. Calamity gave no indication she was affected by the vitriol, instead she simply walked to the bar and poured herself some champagne. While her back was turned Yorinobu knelt and pulled a knife from his father’s robes. Armed, he began slowly approaching the woman.
“Did you imagine, little dragon, that you could destroy the whole of that rotten garden merely by breaking its walls and killing its chief gardener? No. A garden so grand is not built by the efforts of one man. Nor will it die with him.” The woman sneers, though, whether it’s the vintage Yorinobu had on offer, or her assessment of his competence that leaves a sour taste in her mouth V can’t tell. “Without sacrifice your flames will burn as impotently as Silverhand’s, and the tower will be built anew unchanged.”
Yorinobu crosses the final meters of distance between them in a blur, the stolen blade flashes out lightning quick and there is the tinkling of a dropped glass breaking.
“As I was saying.” Calamity continues now leaning, as if she had always been there, against the double doors of the penthouse balcony. “The Knights return, you’ve a corpse to explain, and ever so many vile gardeners to purge. Do be sure not to miss any-”
V is pretty sure Calamity would have continued goading the presumptive Emperor, except he finally got clever and interrupted her by way of remotely opening the double doors she had been leaning on. The sudden lack of support lead to a deeply undignified fall out onto the windy terrace.
The woman’s smile, if anything, blazed brighter with triumph as she picked herself up. Given that they’re all hundreds of meters up, high above any potential wind breaks, and her outfit might as well have been several sails stitched together this normally simple task is…complicated. The silks draped from the shoulder of her dress to the bangles around her wrists were beautiful, sure, but they really did catch the wind at the most inconvenient angles. The elevator dings and V is forced to tear her attention away from the extremely attractive sight of a woman managing to make flailing against the wind a dignified motion to the extremely chilling sight of Adam Goddamn Smasher and the dead Emperor’s personal bodyguard sharing an elevator.
“Smashy!” The woman in red calls as though she were speaking to a small beloved dog. She says some other things- V’s kiroshi subtitling picks up “more psycho than cyber”- but the majority is lost in the monstrous rush of sound and air that comes with four pounds of solid rocket fuel being quickly converted into gas and thrust within a confined space. Specifically, the elevator Smasher and Saburo’s bodyguard are sharing.
V whips her head around, far too slowly to see how narrowly the two shoulder launched anti personnel missiles that Adam Smasher had just fired sped by Calamity, but her gaze is fast enough to track them to their end. She catches sight of one as its tracking catches a Wyvren bot and throws the missile into a hard turn before exploding to pepper the Wyvren’s armor with shrapnel. The other explodes somewhere up above V’s line of sight. Calamity, it seems, had been blown off her feet by the high winds; depriving the missiles of their primary target.
“She-she killed my father!” Yorinobu yells. The pop of the Emperor’s body guard moving into action is so fast and intense V mistakes it for a sonic boom for a moment. The man crosses the room almost as quickly as Smasher’s missiles had. But Calamity is only a half step from the edge, though she moves no faster than an unaugmented person she manages to tip over the edge with a wink aimed directly at V just as the bodyguard’s hands close over the air her gown had just vacated.
To V’s astonishment the man follows her over the edge without the slightest hesitation. There’s a quiet moment as Smasher, V, Jackie, and Yorinobu all stare as one, unified in bafflement, at the empty porch. Then Smasher presses a button on the elevator. “I’m going after her.” He says, almost daring Yorinobu to object.
“I think that would be wise.” Yorinobu agrees, walking to join Smasher in the elevator. His pace halts halfway there when he sees the book open on top of the lizard enclosure. The page turns his face white as a sheet. Then he masters himself and continues. “Yes. I think we had better ensure the fall is lethal.”
Alone at last in the penthouse V takes what feels like her first breath in years as she looks up at Jackie’s nervous shock bubbling up into shocked relief that staying quiet had actually worked. V lets out a half a laugh; before choking it off in a panic when she hears a faint tink. Jackie hears it too and they turn two horrified gazes to the balcony.
To the man dragging himself up off the edge, then walking straight towards them. No towards Saburo’s body still laying where it fell at their feet. The bodyguard kneels just inches away from V and Jackie. But he has attention only for his slain master.
A few moments of heart wrenching anxiety later the man swears loudly and pounds his fist against the crystal cracking it slightly. “Calamity’s hands could not have made these wounds. I am a fool as well as a failure.” He storms away from the body, lamenting his failure and the tragic fate that had befallen so noble a lord. Guess you didn’t get Emperor bodyguard duty unless you really liked the taste of the propaganda. Then the man stops, his pacing arrested by the same book that had stopped Yorinobu.
He takes heart in the page though. When he crosses the room to kneel before his dead master there is almost a solemn peace in his gait. When he reaches the body he lifts it as though it weighed nothing and begins carrying it to the roof. Speaking in a soft conversational tone as he does so. “Let us return you to your gardens. You shall rest, and I shall explain my failure to your true successor. Perhaps then I shall join you. Rest would be nice would it not?”
The silence that stretches after the roar of the AV’s thrusters reigns long enough that T-bug gets insistent they report in.
“We’re good chica. Somehow.” Jackie says into the comms as he squeezes out of their hiding place after V.
“What the fuck happened?” T-bug asked “You went radio silent the second Calamity showed up.”
“Things got complicated. Though I think it kinda helped.” V says. “There’s way too much to explain over comms but we have the package and an exfil route.”
“Our exit is this way hermana!” Jackie calls quietly, annoyed that V has walked deeper into the apartment.
“Don’t tell me you aren’t curious…” V says as she makes her way to the lizard enclosure and the book that had given everyone pause. “Huh. It’s just a bird. A Green Pheasant according to the book, and someone drew a little rake and crown for it, and gave it angry eyes.”
“Fuck that! Come on V! We already know rich gonks like this are crazy! Vamanos! You wanna still be here to ask when they come back and wonder where the old man’s body is?”
Oh. No V wanted fucking anything but that. “Right, let's get climbing.” She says abandoning the swanky hotel entirely unlooted.
—----------------------------------------------------------
Normally after a shift at the bar Solomon Reed preferred to unwind with sports on the tv as background sound for any bugs, and in case anyone was monitoring the apartment’s media usage, while he put the majority of his attention into coded NUSA reports. Staying up to date on old colleagues he thinks of it. Keeping an eye out, in his own way, for those he’d bled with.
Tonight was not like any other night.
Tonight, for the first time in years, there is someone waiting for him when he gets home. She’s chosen her seat well, and he has to check his instinctual urge to greet the unexpected visitor with a salvo from Pariah, too much risk any missed or overpenetrating rounds could tumble through the wall behind her into the Martinez-Kolvansk residence. Three kids, none of them deserved to see that. Words it was then, until he could get a better firing line at least.
“I don’t remember inviting anyone in.” He said to the woman sitting on his couch fiddling with the tuning pegs of some ancient acoustic instrument. He pretended to go about his normal routine, doffing his coat and making his way over to his fridge for some cool Real Water.
She plucked the strings making a sour discordant note. “You know that was going to be the thrust of my argument.” The woman joked a bit of a drunken slur in her words. “Guess we’ll have to pivot. Don’t worry, I'm flexible.”
“Are you drunk?” He asked using the sound of his voice to cover the slight sound of Pariah’s rails charging for a simultaneous discharge. Visually the weapon was concealed by his coat, folded over one arm.
“Not nearly-“ the woman’s words were cut off by the almost silent whine of the rails discharging and the rounds tearing, much less quietly, through his coat, couch, floor, the downstairs neighbor’s ceiling, their wall, and then harmlessly burying themselves into a local trash pile. “As drunk as this depressing continent deserves.”
He hadn’t seen a bit of movement but she’d gone from lounging on his couch to leaning against the wall of the Martinez-Kolvansk residence in the blink of an eye. Worse, she was now offering him her flask, entirely unruffled by his attempts to gun her down mid sentence.
“Got something good for once. How about you put down your little hand canon, have a drink, and I’ll tell you a story.”
“Disarm myself and drink something that could well be poisoned? No, instead how about I keep my gun and you start talking.” Solomon keeps his voice even, no point giving the woman more clues on how effective her choice of hostage had been. “Starting with a name.”
The woman shrugs “Have it your way.” Then the woman took a long long pull from her silver flask. Fortifying herself, or mere theatrics to get his guard down? Only one had a prayer of working. “I’m Yara, from Pittsburgh.”
“Yara from Pittsburgh.” Solomon repeats as though it were not the flimsiest false identity he’s seen in years. Years spent bouncing at a Night City bar run by a local Fixer. “No need for introductions on my end I assume?”
“Oh I know your name of course, Solomon Reed. Some of your history. I know some people would call you an unsung hero of that disastrous Unification War.”
“Is that how your psych profile thinks I see myself? A Hero?” Anger, only in the appropriate amount, but genuine in his voice, along with just a little pity. Completely affected unfortunately. “Think you might need to shake up your analyst’s training.”
“Oh I was surprised too. Thought for sure you’d be one of hers, yet we’re here and she is elsewhere tonight.” Solomon reminds himself that presence of honesty doesn’t mean the other person isn’t playing you, it just means when they pull the knife the blade is sharp, not yet dulled from repeated use. “Playing her own game, for once towards a goal I wouldn’t mind seeing her reach.”
“And what game are you playing?” Solomon demands.
“I don’t know yet. Truth be told, I'm just a keeper of stories. But don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll find the right one for you. I always do.” She takes another drink, swallows, and continues showing only the signs of inebriation most easily faked. “What’ll it be, Reed? What stirs at your heart strings eh? How do you recognize a Hero? Is it Strength? Endurance? Mercy?”
Solomon Reed lets that pass without comment, without reaction, but it’s perhaps too little and she hones in on it anyway “No. Not Mercy, maybe if I’d found you when you were younger…”
“Oh.” Something clicks in the woman’s head, he sees the moment she figures out the mystery she’s been beating around. He’s played secret games with spies and criminals, politicians and tyrants, if she sought to hide the moment of her realization he would have caught it anyway. But she doesn’t. She merely gets a sad look in her eye, gone in a moment but vast beyond reason.
“You damn fools break my heart everytime.” She took another long drink, longer than the others and when she finishes the drink there’s no remnant of the foolish fop in her mannerisms, she’s purged all slouch and smarm from her demeanor.
“You remind me of this boy I knew. Or perhaps the man he could have grown to be.” Her words were no longer slurred, but they came slowly as if each one dragged with the weight of millennia.
“He was a rebel, a hero, and a coward. He’d only learned to fight to impress the ladies, and only kept it up because of talent. But his little sister dreamed of freedom, said she wouldn’t allow the tyrants of their homeland to hollow her out. That she would be free, even if she had to hack and kill her way there. He tried to talk her out of it, tried to make her see reason. But she would not go back, and he feared her treason would fall on his head too. Worse it might fall on his parents. On innocents.
So he bent to the tyrants, slew her to keep her treason secret, and was paid for it, praised for it, and left an orphan all the same. A coward with a sword standing, as he would be at the end, alone. He wandered then, for a long sick time, hoping eventually to come across a hole that wouldn’t object to him dying in it. Instead he met an angel, and it spoke to him.”
Reed scoffs dryly. Casting yourself as an angelic savior was well worn ground in turning assets, though usually not so literally. He doesn’t say such but does allow a bit of the condescension he feels to slip through his mask. Yara picks it up.
“Oh no, not I. Would that it had been me. See this angel’s Choir wasn’t one of your standard virtues. Endurance and Mercy ride their Chosen hard to be sure, but our boy was a coward remember. A kinslayer. So when he found himself in the eye of a Choir, the voice of Above did not look upon him kindly. Nor did it speak words of forgiveness and grace.” She shudders in memory or for effect Reed can’t tell.
“But wrath and hate can be empowering tools. Even for a Hero, and he used that hate to fuel a rebellion that by all reason should have failed in its cradle. It was then I met him. Bent out of shape by a rival; forced to lead instead of follow.”
“Fascinating as your story is. I'm out of the game. Have been for years.” He says, keeping his voice neutrally interested only through years of practice.
The woman laughs. “No you’re not. That might be what’s safest, what’s wisest, but I think we both know if you were going to rabbit you would have six and a half years ago.” That, more even than her unreal movement to avoid his first shot, unnerves Reed. It references a date he’d never told anyone the significance of. One which would technically have been recorded, but only implicitly and only in the dullest of his, if he’s honest, extensive and exciting medical history. “I want what you want, I want you to win for once. A win you can be proud of.”
“Go on.”
“My friend was not the only patriot fighting, he had companions. Friends, or as close as he could allow himself while burning his hate for strength, but one by one his companions fell. Some were killed, others were still recoverable, if only he’d moved more quickly to save them. His Hunter; lulled into an unnatural sleep, a peaceful dream for a soul that longed for more.” She looked at him demanding he complete the metaphor, and she continued when she saw some flicker of understanding that he failed to mask. “The clever little Thief, skittish and slow to trust, was the worst of his losses. She turned coat you see. Not against their country but against him.”
“He wasn’t the only one fighting for his country.” Reed says trying to regain some measure of control. “There was another, gilded in patriotism but worse than the boy. False in some way.”
She took a deep drink. “Just so. Do you know the difference between you and that boy?”
“Decades of professional experience.” But there’s no bite to it. She’s captured his attention much as he hates to admit it.
She laughs dismissively. “When the boy fought his way past every foul trick and fell bodyguard his rival could muster and place before him, when he struck her down and stood triumphant over the field, he did so alone. Only to be chased away by her friends, whose mirrors he had lost along the way, neglected, killed, or spent by his rival, before he could finish the job.” Alex and So Mi were still alive, So Mi he couldn’t reach. But Alex…it was only cowardice that had kept him from contacting her. Cowardice and the lie he told himself that the higher ups would spot their contact. “Your rival has never met a soul she wouldn’t sell for an ounce of cover. No friends to ride to her rescue.”
Unfortunate. That all but confirmed his read of the rival as Rosalind Meyers.
“Just some things to think about. You’re sure you don’t want any of this? It’s not often I get something with a kick like this and tolerable taste.” She asks, waggling the flask indelicately in his direction. He declines the offer but finds himself moved to indulge another vice. Curiosity.
“In this story of yours, did you ever learn what the angels told the boy to turn him from coward to rebel?”
“Contrition only ever says one thing, when forging a champion.” She evaded. It was nicely done, the inflection bleak and laced with enough pain that most would respect the implicit trauma and push no further.
Reed did not let up. Any information could be the difference in operational success or failure. “Wounds like this don’t go away when kept quiet. Lance it. Bleed it. And let it heal for good.”
She shot him a look of sadness and disappointment, as though she’d held her tongue for his sake instead of her own. Then she spoke.
“Repent.” She said quietly. “You will not be forgiven. Repent.”
Half an hour later when the work phone he never quite let slip from his attention, no matter how many years it’s streak of silence stretched, rang he was still sitting in the dark. Alone.
“Reed?” So Mi’s voice was wracked with emotion, more genuine and overwhelming than he’s heard from her since their first meeting. “I’m sorry. I…I think I need help. I was going to manage it myself but…I’m dying Reed. There’s only one path that I can see to survival but I don’t think I can walk it alone and she… Said I might get lucky, if I asked for trust where none was deserved.”
Solomon Reed was being manipulated. He knew it, he couldn’t not know it. It was transparent, heavy handed, and impulsively put together. He was fairly sure he was being manipulated onto a road that ended with his body in the streets, if not a publicized execution, and yet…it was still working.
“Alright. Bring me up to speed.”
She did, between relieved sobs.