Chapter Text
You had a name once. Your government name. Corpo-name, more like how corpos owned Night City, mayors tied on strings tugging on the leash that the badges happily wore.
Your name would’ve gotten you laughed at on and off the streets. Between the cubicles in Arasaka, too, but that was before they knew you did corporate espionage. Before they realised that you were deadly at it.
Vysora Varadium was an Arasaka corpo rat obsessed with efficiency and excellence. But you? You hang out in Kabuki yet wear the threads of a corpo like second skin.
Suits you once wore and suits you wear still. It hides the ink well, it does, patterns from neck to arm and chest to shin. You’ve never worn any lesser than a three-piece for the office and only folks with skeezy cyberware for eyes would suspect anything more. (They don’t stay long around you. You’ve got yellow-rimmed eyes to match, acid metal boring into their thin, flabby souls.)
Watson kids grow up all the same, you think. Not all the Watson kids live long. Overdoses and drive-bys catch them faster than an Arasaka hit squad.
You, however. You’re a Watson kid who gets zeroed because of your own boss. Something you forget doesn’t get you far in corpo the way it does on the bullet-pocked cement of Watson. Loyalty gets you killed in corpo world. Loyalty skins your insides out in Arasaka. End of day, you’re not big enough to cushion your fall without Jenkins around.
Grow up in shit and grow out into shit, is what the abuelos on the roadsides would say. Jackie dreamt of fast cars and city lights to never want again, but you dreamt of iron-hard rice-bowl salaries and bloodied hands to never feel your stomach growl from hunger again.
You grew up in the streets. You knew the monsters that ripped itself from the bodies of humans because of that bone-deep hunger. So, of course you know what it meant to be offered a place in Arasaka Academy with a full scholarship.
All it takes is one wrong move. It's a move you find yourself trapped in, between two ladder-climbers eyeing the fat paycheck forever out of your reach. You, stuck in an unfolding corpo-version of a gunfight, just the way it was outside City Centre’s crisp-clean boulevards.
That's why you sucked as a corpo-rat. You didn’t have ambition. You only were a cog satisfied with their place in the grinding gears of Night City.
(Or, as some would mercilessly whisper — you were happy just being Jenkin’s girl.)
That's how the world devoured you, two glasses deep in a booth at Lizzie’s.
No more Jenkins, no more Vysora.
So a Watson kid comes crawling back to Watson. Goodbye Trauma Team Gold and Arasaka cyberware; function reduced to cosmetic, deadweight in your bones. Worse, all you have now is a few thousand credits to your name and a few thousand less in payments due.
But street kids don’t forget each other. Don’t care if Watson or Heywood or Pacifica. The streets look out for each other like how corpos scrub the blood off each other’s hands. Problem was, you never were a blue-blooded corpo, only red-blooded like the rest of the street kids; good enough only to play ball with the blue-bloods for a time. That’s what you forget, foolhardy and ambitious in wanting to rewrite your life script of another nobody from Little China with a scholarship to your name.
Jackie Welles doesn’t forget you, unblemished corpo skin or not. Watson folk looked at you differently when you got on that Arasaka payroll. Some hated your face. Most refused to breathe the same toxic, fumed-up Night City air you both shared.
(If they found out you were counterintel. A bullet to your brain would be a mercy)
And Jackie Welles dies. Bleeds out in his black and white suit in a Delamain cab like another suit who’s outlived his usefulness.
Funny, you. Terminated at gunpoint in Lizzie’s, roped into a heist at Konpeki before you can say nova, watched Yorinobu choke his father to death and now, you’re the one walking away when it should’ve been Jackie. At least there’d be people who’d miss him.
Not like it mattered anyway. Dexter DeShawn shoots you dead not long after. Probably for the best, the way your hard-earned reputation in bloodless jobs-well-done is probably in tatters now. Forget ever wanting to slum it with the Afterlife crowd – if your usual fixers rang you up again after that, you’d consider it salvation.
Then, you wake up crawling out of a fucking dumpster in the Badlands with a pest of a rockstar nagging in your ears.
You’re riding in the rain, bike sturdy in your hands. Jackie’s Arch. That's all you do. That’s all you did, those days after the heist when you had the strength to stand. Just ash in your throat and raindrops lashing against your skin.
Round and round the city in an infinite carousel loop in the furthest reaches of fumed-up, industrial toxic hell with the shiniest lights on the West Coast.
No one to call, and no one who’d call, not with how Jackie and T-Bug’s death had unwound the threads linking your tight little group together. You can’t stomach being around Mama Welles or Misty, and Viktor’s an old-timer when it comes to feelings – just like you.
So you ride alone at two hundred miles an hour till your bike skids to a stop. Fill it up with gas and off you go again. Again, and again.
Just like after Arasaka, you’ll have to pull yourself out of the gutter again.
This time, alone.
Regina calls you one day.
You’re staring at the ceiling in your megabuilding apartment, wondering how Arasaka hit squads have yet to burst down your door. Or your landlord, even. You’re a few months past rent. Not for the lack of eddies, just.
“V, you alive?”
That's when you realised you picked up her call, only to have her hear your silence and muted breathing.
You stay flat on your back, watching the fan spin. “Regrettably. Should’ve died at Konpeki, but here I am.”
“You telling me you had something to do with that shitfest at Arasaka a while back?”
“Tell you in person someday.” You watch your toes wiggle. You’re wiggling them. At least losing control of corpo cyberware didn’t turn you into a vegetable. “So Regina. What can I help with?”
She's worried. You can tell. This is a reason why she’s your preferred fixer with your preferred type of jobs. Padre too, sometimes, the way he’s a god-fearing man and he’s selective in the gigs he takes. Just not when he asks you to play Angel Gabriel and deliver justice to those he has personal vendettas against, though.
Wakako, however. She would thrive in Arasaka and find her way at the top, if not for her disdain for corpos on principle. That shows in the type of jobs she offers, and you think you want to save what’s left of your soul at this point.
(No, you refuse to answer El Capitan’s persistent holos. Especially after he asked you to steal cars.)
“Got a few gigs if you’re keen. Cyberpsychos or something more… straightforward?”
You feel a headache coming on. At least Johnny's made himself scarce the past few days. Neither of them are happy to share a body, anyway. The pills are scattered alluringly on your bookshelf.
“Straightforward, please. Not sure I can be gentle these few days.”
“Honesty appreciated.” Even a gonk can tell how Regina's fond of you; rough edges and all. “So, how do you feel about a hit on an NCPD officer… by her own department?”
Regina continues before you have a chance to tell her to piss off. “I feel sorry for the girl, so I hoped you could work your corpo expertise and find another way.”
Regina means convince the girl to see reason and leave before it’s too late.
Another spin of the fan. There’s dust clinging to the blades, blackened and gross. This is when you admire Regina's skill as a journalist — they always had a good sense of folks and a nose that got them into equal parts trouble and revelation.
You think you’re a tiny bit sorry for the girl too. “Send me the deets. I'll see what I can do.”
“Thanks V. Better you than anyone else.”
The holo ends. The fan keeps spinning.
“A former corpo and a badge merc? Of all bodies to be stuck in…”
“Shut up, Johnny.” You roll over, curl yourself into the tiniest ball you can be, and close your eyes.
If anything, at least your unwanted guest can take a hint when you’re not in the mood. Small mercies. You have people you should apologise to from your past life, but certainly not a tobacco-stinkin’ rockerboy with a few guitar pegs loose.
The fan keeps spinning. You hear the occasional creak of the blade, counting down an invisible timer.
Your days are numbered, but… this is why Regina's your favourite fixer, before and after Konpeki. And Regina keeps calling, despite everything. She's Reggie to you, now.
“I like your work, V. Maybe it’s your Arasaka habits, but you keep things clean. Professional. Mercs handling badge work need to be.”
“Force of habit, I suppose. Suits are a bitch to clean when dirty,” You remember telling her, the day you meet her at her office near Lizzie’s. You never shared what exactly you did back at Arasaka. Nor did she ask. You think she knows, however, so you appreciate her discretion even more.
You stopped wearing suits the day Arasaka erased you. Instead, it’s boots and fitting shirts with sleeves rolled to the elbows with your sleeve tattoos out. Dress shirts in muted office colours tucked into durable cargo pants, and it helps you feel grounded at least.
You have to. You spend most of your time subduing cyberpsychos and picking fights with Maelstrom that you’ve got enough eddies to swap out the old chrome and then some. Why, you have no idea, but it’s not much different from your time in Arasaka – an implant here, an implant there, just to make work easier. Now, it's less for office drudgery and more for the killing kind.
(Oh yes. When you shoot Maelstrom gangers dead, you always see the glint of your chrome in theirs before they all drop and hit the floor.)
Regina's your main source of work and structure in your life again, until you find the courage to meet Takemura at Tom’s Diner.
Arasaka haunts you like the ghost of Rache Bartmoss on the Night City psyche yet you’re nowhere as skilled a netrunner as you should be, given your previous occupation.
Deadpan aside, Takemura somehow smacks sense into you without lifting a finger. Former bodyguard turned ronin, possessed by another kind of ghost that you know all too well. Grief is like a handprint on the heart stinging to the touch, and yours looks somewhat similar to his, you know.
No, you don’t want to find the Queen of the Afterlife. Showing your face there after that farce of a gig, even after being presumed dead? No. Never. Your corpo sensibilities would never allow you to debase yourself that way.
Instead, you pick up your phone and you call Judy Alvarez.
Yes, Judy Alvarez of the Mox. The very woman who stared knives at you the moment you walked into her studio with Evelyn Parker. The same woman whose expression turned glacial when you casually remarked about your corpo history.
Walking, talking corpses.
She had every reason to spit the ground you walked. Probably was rougher than she usually was for the braindance sequence, for someone of her calibre.
This is why this thought keeps you awake some nights, staring at the spinning fan of your apartment in complete darkness:
How the hell did you snag the attention of the best braindance editor in all of Watson?