The last twenty four hours had been the worst in V's life. Not 'maybe', not 'probably', no. Hands down the most miserable, horripilant and maddening hours of his life.

First, Saburo Arasaka's death. That wasn't really something that got to him personally, but he had seen the man that practically ruled the world for the last fifty years die, and he had died strangled by his son right in front of V's eyes. Then, one of her partners in crime had her brain fried on a mission in Konpeki plaza hotel. While on voice call with V. He had heard every single one of her screams as every last of her synapses burned out.

Jackie… oh, Jackie… V had seen clear as day as Adam Smasher ripped his arm clean off. Mangled muscle, bone pulled right out the socket. V had done nothing to help. His arms had locked in place and his hands had stopped answering even as Jackie rolled on the floor, bloodied and in tears.

And of course, one couldn't not mention fucking dying. The feeling of that bullet through his skull still made him nauseous. The vague recollection of the junkyard wasn't something he was too happy remembering.

Then waking up in Viktor's clinic, with a woman she knew nothing of jacked into his terminal, only to tell him minutes later that he was going to die, and what was going to kill him was the consciousness of America's most deadly terrorist slowly but surely overwriting his own.

Johnny, evidently, hadn't had the courtesy of sparing V one night, one single minute of that last night. Threatening to kill him if he got in his way, telling him to shoot himself… He wasn't shaping up to be the ideal roommate.

The conversation with Takemura that morning had at least given him some goals. Tracking Evelyn was one, and the man working on the Relic was the other. That felt at least a tiny bit reassuring in his out of control world.

And now he was in front of the Afterlife, to explore his last lead. To find out what that woman could offer and most importantly, why she offered to help. Noone in Night City did something from the goodness in their heart.

V made his way inside. He had only been there once, but the bouncer let him through without a word. He even gave him a sympathetic gaze. Not a surprise though. The news about Konpeki Plaza had spread like a wildfire. V pulled his hood over his head, hiding.

Once inside, a man came to him.

"You look a lot better without a gaping hole in your head."

Shortish hair, moustache, thin, ancient looking cyberarm. He looked more like a server in a fancy restaurant than he did anything else.

"Who are you?"

"Name's Falco. But you aren't here to see me. The room next to Rogue's."

V turned around. He had heard of Rogue before, a fixer. And a big shot one at that. He had done his homework and read a bit about Johnny, and her name came up alongside his a fair few times. Someone with a name as big as hers must have guards out of her ass, so the room with two burly muscle heads was probably hers. V opened the door next to that room.

Inside, the same woman from the day before. Same rather skimpy outfit, same white hair, same cigarettes, and same void expression.

"Thought it would take you longer." she said

"I make it a point not to arrive late to my appointments."

"I don't know how things are in Atlanta, but Night City, punks tend to run around aimlessly when they are scared. Thought you would do that too. Turns out, you aren't quite the same as everyone else."

V didn't even bother asking how she knew about Atlanta. Night City was just like that. Ask the right people with the right attitude, and you would get the right answers. V pressed the button in the middle table. Soon after, the door opened. Claire, with her usual smile and carefree attitude… until she laid eyes on the woman.

"...Lucy? Is that you?"

"...yes." By the looks of it, the woman, Lucy, hadn't quite liked the sudden interruption.

"Claire, my friend Lucy and I want something to drink."

Claire looked at Lucy for a few seconds, as if she couldn't believe what she was seeing. Then, she left. A few minutes passed before she came back with two drinks.

"A Jackie Welles, and a David Martínez. I'll be at the bar if you need anything else."

She left and closed the door, leaving V alone with the woman named Lucy. V took a sip of his drink. Strong and packed a punch. Just like Jackie. He sighed.

The woman frowned, "You are sharp. Too much for my liking."

"Well, now I know two things. That your name is Lucy, and that David Martínez is important to you. You know my name's V and that I fucked up a heist on Arasaka. So why don't we talk biz? I'm done being taken advantage of."

V had taken a gamble. Night City was a place of sharks and little fish. Either you managed to scare away someone with your bravado, or you ended the night as a corpse with a bullet in your head or your throat slit. And V had had enough of that for a lifetime.

Lucy finally sighed in frustration.

"What do you want to know?"

"I want to know what it is that you want." said V, putting emphasis on the 'you'. "My two years in Atlanta haven't made me forget how things work in Night City. Noone does anything out of the goodness of their heart."

"I want to burn Arasaka to the ground."

"Hey." Johnny materialised, laying against the wall "I like this woman."

"The fact that a terrorist like you likes her isn't exactly reassuring." V told Johnny. Apparently, Lucy found V speaking to the void amusing. She chuckled.

"Silverhand and I… aren't that different. At least if he's anything like how his songs make him sound like. Yes, I want Asaraka gone." said Lucy "And I won't stop at anything to make it happen."

"What fucking beef do you two have with them?"

Lucy opened her pack of cigarettes, but she seemed to reconsider for some reason.

"You'll have plenty of lonely nights to speak with Johnny about it. As for me, it's far too long of a story."

V made himself comfortable. Seeing as Lucy hadn't even tried to touch her drink, he took it from the tray and took a sip.

"Vodka and Nicola, huh…"

"David would have hated it. He hated carbonated drinks."

"How about you speak of this David of yours?" asked V. The best way to learn if someone was trustworthy was knowing what kind of deals they had in the past.

"I'll take care of that, if you don't mind."

The door opened for a brief second to let someone in. The same man from before, Falco. He took a seat.

"Story's kinda long, so you'll have to make do with a summary. Good enough?"

"Go ahead."

Falco made himself comfortable. "Lucy and I were part of a group of Edgerunners led by a man called Maine. May have heard of him."

"Bazooka arm Maine. Heard something about him." Said V. Not much, in all honesty, but he was a name that had popped up once when speaking to Padre.

"We were a band of troublemakers, looking back." Falco took the cocktail from V's hand and laid back, his eyes shining with some faint nostalgia. "Gang was relatively large, but the main group… We were a crew of six."

"That's fairly large for a crew not affiliated with any fixer directly." Mentioned V

"Big enough to land fixer jobs, small enough to go unnoticed by other groups" Falco took a sip from V's drink "You grew up on Heywood, didn't you? You know how merc groups go."

"Here one day, underground the next." sighed V. He had seen many kids die in the streets due to taking the wrong step, or making the wrong decision. In that sense Atlanta wasn't much different from Night City.

"We lost Sasha one day, raiding Biotechnica HQ. Then Kiwi came along and brought Lucy. She can tell you the rest."

"The rest goes exactly like any merc's life goes. Rob here, shoot someone in that dark alley over there, gather info from private nets. Until one of our dealers died." she continued.

V grimaced. It was always a huge inconvenience to have someone who supplied cyberware, hacks or ammo die. Not only did you have to find someone else, you also had to make sure they didn't trace their deals back to you.

"That was David's mother, Gloria Martínez. We took him in. He was enthusiastic and always working. I think he saw a father in Maine or something."

"He died, didn't he." That was the inevitable end for all good things.

"Maine…" Falco doubted for a second "He went apeshit. Cyberpsychosis. Killed his girlfriend and then blew himself up right in front of David."

Stories about cyber psychos weren't rare in Night City at all. In fact, Regina had been breaking V's ass to capture as many alive as he could. But psychos usually went through a long process of isolating themselves from loved ones and society overall. To have someone kill their loved ones directly in front of someone else important to them… that was far more upsetting than the usual junkie killing their fellow junkies.

"After that, David took control." Continued Falco "A few good years. But shit hit the fan like a month ago. Arasaka kidnapped Lucy to lure David out."

"Why lure him out?"

"David had… outrageous resistance to Cyberpsychosis." Said Lucy "I couldn't believe it either at first, but he managed to use a Sandevistan eight times the same day he got it, without suppressors."

V's eyes widened at the absurdity of the feat. He looked at Lucy, but after she returned an uncomfortable gaze, he understood she didn't want to continue. Falco took her place.

"That last day… well, we lost the rest of the crew. David managed to get Lucy out of there, but Adam Smasher dropped from the top of Arasaka tower and landed on Rebecca." The shaken look in Falco's eyes made it evident it wasn't a pleasant memory. "The whole plaza collapsed. Then I grabbed Lucy and left."

"Was David alive?"

"Listen kid, we left him with Smasher. And he had gone cyberpsycho. He didn't even recognise Rebecca or me in the end. Either way, he didn't last much longer."

What followed was a long, awkward silence. V had heard enough sob stories about gangs being killed for fuckinf up, or simply just because other gangs felt like it. But hearing how it all fell apart from the only two survivors from the crew… it made it feel horribly personal. T-Bug's death had disappointed him. And the guilt from leaving Jackie behind, alone, with Adam Smasher, it was still eating at him from the inside.

He took a better look at the two in front of them. Lucy had very marked eye bags. Probably lack of sleep. Her eyes were also bloodshot and she was nervously tapping the floor with her foot. Falco was dangerously thin for a man in his thirties or forties.

Was that V's future?

If he didn't outright die, would he just have to resign himself to become a husk of his former self?

Fucking no. He wasn't about to let that happen.

"Okay, let's go." He stood up, taking Lucy and Falco by surprise.

"Wait, go where?" said Lucy, standing out herself, confused.

"On a little job. Trusting you as a person is a completely different thing from trusting you with Biz. I have a woman to find, one of the leads I got from Takemura."

"Who even is this woman? Hey, I am…."

Both V and Lucy disappeared through the door, leaving Falco alone with his own thoughts.

"Kid's good, but it's gonna take more than that for Lucy to trust him…"

Falco reminded himself of the old times. Not the good times, there had never been any true good times. But there had been decent ones. He remembered their days with Sasha. The first time Kiwi had brought Lucy, as a kid almost eight years prior. The day when they took David in. The day when he and Lucy revealed they were a couple. Rebecca fuming like a locomotive. Maine just kissing Dorio in front of everyone without a shred of modesty…

Falco took a sip from the drink. He sighed.

"David… Lucy was right. You would have hated this drink."


THE FOLLOWING DAY, AROUND NOON

"So you are dying, and the first idea you have is to make a trip to a glorified whorehouse to look onto some vague lead on one of its whores. Gotta say I'm impressed."

"Shut it, Johnny." hissed V. On the upside, Johnny had let him sleep the night before, after their deal with Lucy and Falco. On the other side, though, he was an absolute pain in the ass and an asshole ninety percent of V's waking time. "You know exactly why we are here. I didn't come to party."

"I know we are hitting this place to find someone. That I can respect. But what do you expect to find out from someone who sucks dick for a living?"

"I said shut the fuck up."

"You really need to start talking to yourself instead of out loud."

Lucy appeared from the elevator. She had decided to come with them. Well, she had come with V, Johnny just… happened to hang around inside Vs mind.

"Did no one ever teach you not to stand out? Someone speaking to the air is bound to make people turn their heads."

"Yeah, some old and wrinkly ass rockerboy wannabe mentioned something of the sort yesterday after I met Takemura."

"Fuck you, V." Johnny flickered for a brief moment before disappearing. V smiled. "You are late, Lucy."

"That girl, Judy. Why didn't she come?" said Lucy, ignoring V's comment.

V shrugged. "Beats me. I suppose a girl that makes her living selling braindances doesn't really want to be here in case things get dangerous."

V had intended to make less of the issue, but all he got was a frown from Lucy. He knew why. The same chatter Johnny had given him about not trusting Judy and her being out to stab them in the back. Nevertheless, they entered Clouds. The entrance fee was 500 eurodollars and a peek into V's mind to see what turned him on, apparently. They were heading into a whorehouse after all.

The next ten minutes were an increasingly stressing and anxiety-inducing experience talking to a doll that had information V didn't really want to get out. He didn't even get to ask about Evelyn before using his safeword. When he opened the door to booth 9 again, Lucy was waiting for him there.

"Find anything out?" said Lucy

"No." V shook his head "That didn't go as expected."

"Told you." Johnny appeared out of thin air, laying against the wall next to Lucy. It seemed that he was really fixated on pointing out V's mistakes.

"Fuck off, you brain parasyte."

"Good, we'll do things my way." Lucy nodded towards the door at the end of the hallway. A door leading upstairs, with a burly bodyguard standing next to it. "There, the VIP floor."

"I may not have mentioned this, but I am not really what you would call a Very Important Person. You probably need a pass to go up there."

"Visually Irritating Pussy fits better, I agree." Laughed Johnny, making V's eyelid twitch.

"I know. Go to the toilet for a second, next to the door."

V sighed but did as he was told. He waited inside the toilet for a few seconds, until a man appeared. It didn't take him even two steps to seize up and fall to the ground like a log.

"What the…"

Even surprised as he was, V didn't waste a second. He dug in the man's pockets and fished out his VIP card, and pushed him into one of the closed toilet doors. All he had to do was go out of the toilet, and cross the door with Lucy at his side.

"Did you fry that guy's brains?"

She shook her head. "Too messy. Just a short circuit. He will be up and running in a few hours."

V made a mental note of not pissing her off. He felt like he wouldn't even get a courtesy warning. Past the door, a flight of stairs led to the VIP area, a room with a lot of soft-looking couches, weird, globe-like lamps and screens that spanned the entirety of some of the walls. Some of those walls were likely to be just doors to other Doll booths.

Johnny groaned. "Two fuck toys in a single day is too much even for me."

"Stop complaining, for fucks sake. We'll go nice and slow, you won't have to bother with more dolls for a long ass time."

"No, we tried to do things nice and slow already. As I said, now we will do it my way."

One of the wall screens started flickering. Not enough to bother the customers, but enough to get the attention from one of the bodyguards. Lucy took the opportunity to slip through, grabbing V's hand and pulling him past the door the guard was standing in front of, onto a darker hallway. V got a display on his Kiroshi Mk Is. A restricted area. It soon clicked in V's mind.

"You want to go directly to the boss."

"Some musclehead that's just here to stand in front of a door and ask no questions won't know where your little doll is."

"Well put."

She had decided that in the short amount of time since leaving the previous booth. V was honestly impressed. No wonder she was a successful edgerunner back then.

He wondered how she had gotten started on it. V himself had… rather questionable parents. His childhood could be summarized as cocaine, sex and gambling. It was that gambling that got his parents to lose their money, so they ended up selling V to the Valentinos. For more drug and gambling money.

But Lucy? All V knew was that she had joined Maine's band a long time ago. Nothing on why she had started. Nothing on what motivated her. Other than revenge against a corpo. He didn't have time to think about the matter for much longer though, since they arrived at a door that looked different from the others.

They made their way in. The office wasn't particularly fancy nor messy, but it did have a certain style to it. Behind the desk, a rather big man sat, eating a burger. He didn't look the least bit surprised nor bothered to see them.

"Customers ain't allowed here. Go back the way you came from."

V sighed to himself. He had dealt with other people like that man before. They just liked to pretend that whoever showed at their door was just some other customer, some dealer, some thug. They tried to ignore the fact that someone had gone out of their way to find them. Like a kid pretending not to hear their parents when told to go to sleep. And it was irritating.

Taking a more discreet approach was probably the right call.

"Listen, we ain't customers. We came here to make a deal."

The man stood up and made circles around Lucy.

"I'll offer you a good price. Girl has a nice body."

V had to hold back the urge to punch the man in the face. It was to be expected he would get the offer considering where they were, but still… He was also concerned Lucy would fry the man for real this time.

"Listen, we are looking for a woman named Evelyn Parker."

"Noone working here by that name." He sat back down and kept eating his burger, paying V and Lucy no mind.

"Tell us what we need to know." calmly said Lucy.

"I told you. She doesn't work here."

"We both know she used to."

"What do you want with her anyway?" He put his legs on the table. "Plenty of better looking girls in Clouds. Her ass isn't that special for you to go digging shit up."

The man was starting to get on V's nerves.

"Listen, I am going to find her with, or without your help."

"Good, you can go without. Get out of my office."

"Oswald, are you always so dense and irritatingly cocky?" said Lucy

"I am not going to play games with you." he shrugged

"Good, so you think this is a game." Lucy rolled up her sleeve.

V's breathing stopped. On her forearm, there was a very intricate tattoo of a red tiger bearing its fangs, with a skull on top. The distinctive smart link tattoo worn by Tyger Claws. Oswald went white.

"Turns out some of the funds destined to this fine establishment have recently gone missing." she said, staring Oswald dead in the eye. "Jun's not really liking that, Woodman."

"I… don't know anyone by that name."

"Why would you? You aren't important enough. Now please, behave, and I may tell them it's a mistake on the bank's side."

"Now that I think about it…" V scratched his head, feigning innocence "I wonder what would happen if some rumours about the manager kicking some rightful customers were to spread…"

"Fine!" That seemed to finally crack him. "She stopped pulling profit. Her doll chip was fried, so I sent her to a weren't able to do shit. I left her with them as payment."

"See?" grinned V "Wasn't that hard. Name and address."


HALF AN HOUR LATER

Lucy would have liked nothing more than going to the run down apartment she had rented with what little money she had left and sleep for what was left of the day. Or maybe take a long bath, if the hot setting on her shower worked. Or even gone out for dinner, if that part of Watson had anything even remotely resembling a restaurant. Or she had money to afford eating out.

But no. There was an order to things. Just like she had to find this Parker woman with V before taking on Arasaka, she had to report to the fixer before going home.

The fact that V had chosen to follow her was rather irritating, but far from a problem. Lucy just wasn't used to trusting people, so she had to keep her eye on him as he walked behind her. Who knew what he could do if she lowered her guard, after all?

"Didn't know you worked with Wakako." he said

"Didn't know you knew who Wakako was." she feigned ignorance. But honestly, it wasn't a surprise. Wakako was the go to fixer for small, well paying jobs. It made sense that any merc from any part of Night City knew about her.

"Been working for her for a few weeks. Had a job with Jackie, before the heist, to get a corpo woman out of a scavenger-controlled apartment."

Lucy frowned. The scavengers were a nasty bunch. Not that they had ever bothered her personally, especially working under Maine or David, but they were a nasty bunch nonetheless from what she had heard and seen.

"What are we going to do here anyway?"

"You'll see."

Lucy entered Wakako's office, shortly followed by V. The guard tried to stop them at first, scanning them before letting them through. Inside was the same Wakako Lucy had known for almost ten years, since she had first come to Night City. An old japanese lady with round glasses and a steadfast presence bound to intimidate anyone.

"Lucy, V. I was expecting you two."

"Good morning, Wakako. How's biz?"

"Things are going wonderfully." she stacked a few papers and put them to the side. "First things first. V, I'm sorry about Jackie. He was a good man."

People usually approached Wakako like they did every other fixer. Lucy remembered her days with Faraday, up to roughly a month before. A calculating, scheming man with no value for anything but his relationship with Arasaka and his money. Or Rogue, with no regard for anything that didn't give her more power and control over the undercity's deals and connections.

But Wakako was different. She was a family woman. She had sons she had to vouch for, and she had a soft side. It was that soft side that had allowed Lucy to take advantage of the Tyger Claw tattoo.

V just smiled weakly.

"Worst part is his family didn't have anything to bury."

"I've had to bury a grandson of mine." she stared into V's eyes with a mix between sympathy and sternness "Closure isn't always nice. Especially when you are the one that throws in the first shovel's worth of dirt." She stared at Lucy next. "Did you manage?"

"Yes." Lucy rolled my sleeve back, and Wakako took out a small device. "Threatening someone with the Tyger Claw's name can be a great negotiating tactic."

"I hope you took advantage of it, because it's not happening again." She turned the device on. It was a simple laser removal tool. In a mere twenty seconds, the smart link tattoo was gone. "That's about all I am willing to do, as a favour. For you, and for David's sake. The kid didn't deserve what he got. So young…"

He didn't. He hadn't deserved anything at all that had happened in his depressingly short life, Lucy thought. David hadn't gotten almost anything of the things he did deserve. Night City was just that unfair. It had been Arasaka's fault, it had been Night City's fault, and it had also been her own fault.

So it was also her duty to set things right.

"Didn't take you to be one to do favours just like that, Wakako." V inquired. "Did Lucy work for you, or David, back in the day?"

Wakako shook her head. "You are not aware how Tyger Claws work, are you?"

V scratched his head. "Organised crime, fast bikes, yakuza, laundering… oh, how could I forget. Human trafficking, prostitution…" he said, counting them with his fingers

"That's how we make money, a completely different thing." said Wakako coldly.

Lucy sighed. That was the impression Tyger Claws gave. And it wasn't exactly wrong. Every single one of the things V had mentioned were daily occurrences on their turf. . "The Tyger Claws used to stand something different. Protection of ethnic Asians in Night City, to prevent them from being harassed by Americans, beaten, intimidated or killed. They lost that motivation long ago, but it was still part of their modus operandi."

Wakako nodded along with Lucy'sexplanation. "The Tyger Claws changed a lot after my husband's death. And since Saito-san's death. But that is what we used to stand for. My old age has made me stick by our old principles."

"But for Lucy?" asked V "Lucy doesn't strike me as an asian name. And Martínez is latino."

Lucy debated with herself whether or not to tell V. Her real name was something she had only ever told David. And not before becoming a couple. Noone else. Not Maine, who had taken her in like a father would. Not Kiwi, who had picked her up from the lowest of the low in Night City. Not to Rebecca, the closest she had ever had to a proper friend.

But she needed him. People in Night City wouldn't touch a corpo as big as Arasaka with a ten feet pole. Lucy couldn't make do with any old person with animosity towards Arasaka. No. She needed someone that despised them enough to want to topple them, and desperate enough to try. Maybe V didn't know it yet, but attempting to survive the chip's slow curse would force him to take on Arasaka in a violent manner. And Lucy aimed to take that opportunity.

"Because I am half Japanese, half Polish." she said, looking at V. "These days, I go by Lucy. But my birth name is Lucyna Kushinada."


Author's notes:

There you go!

This is once again a chapter that was originally shorter. It was intended to only have the first segment with V meeting Lucy and Falco. But it felt a bit too short so I added the events of the following day.

The crew of six Falco speaks of was before Lucy or even Kiwi joined. I don't know if there is a chronological timeline of everyone joining, but for this fic's story, consider those "six" to be Maine, Dorio, Rebecca, Pilar, Falco and Sasha. Sasha is a canonical character to the edgerunners anime (and thus the cyberpunk universe), even if she only appears in the ending song animation, and her death is, canonically, the same as mentioned in this fanfic. I doubt I will touch some more on her in this fanfic so if you want to find out what little else there is to know about her, you can watch the ending animation for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, or read her wiki page.

V's timely recovery from her deplorable mental state was something that always struck me as weird, but looking back, I guess he was simply too busy trying to live to properly grieve. That is the feeling I am aiming for here.

Also, about the last segment with Lucy and Wakako. The Tyger Claws were indeed aiming to protect asian people in the past, and they seemingly somewhat abandoned that way. Wakako is simply that old fashioned. And Lucy's name is indeed Lucyna Kushinada (or Kushinada Lucyna, if you want it the japanese way). That much is true and canon. It's also the name of the mother of one of Edgerunner's producers!

I hope you enjoyed this bit of writing, and until next time!

PS: if you don't enjoy this format (multiple short segments written with a short time period between them), be sure to tell me!

EDIT: thanks to Booze the Klax Knight for ever so kindly pointing out an inconsistency with canon. Turns out the final draft got out instead of the fully reviewed dpcument. The only change is Falco mentioning a crew od six instead of a crew of four.