Passing by the one large window of Aiden's apartment, Lucy noticed just how red her face was in the reflection. She did a double take, stared at it, and pawed at her face in quiet embarrassment. Well, it wasn't so quiet- she cupped her face with her hands and let out a muffled screech, one that wouldn't wake the other Netrunner passed out on the couch.
"We've got a corp to burn?!," she cringed. "Why did I say that?! That was so embarrassing!"
She could imagine the laughter coming from his mouth the instant he woke up. Here was this girl with red eyeliner stains down her cheeks, putting her hands in her pockets and acting all cool and suave, when really she was just as dead as he was. Both on the inside from all the immunosuppressants, and in a couple of hours.
THUMP THUMP THUMP! Feeling the need to vomit yet again, she propped herself up on the marble kitchen counter and breathed. The sound of boots running up the apartment stairs got louder and louder and the door was practically kicked in. A slender figure beelined towards Aiden, dropping her two plastic bags of stuff by the couch- in the minutes she spent with him she would fish tools and gadgets and medicines from it and use it on Aiden. Lucy had only seen a similar kind of treatment when she 'accidentally' scratched someone's expensive car a few years back. Except...to a lesser degree. She just knew that if she wasn't there, leaned against the counter, smoking a cigarette, Julia would be crying and sobbing.
Instead, relief washed over her. She checked- by some miracle, Aiden and Lucy shared the same blood type. But despite this, she started to drain it out and replace it with nine pints of the synth-blood she bought, as if the only blood that was 'worthy' of being transfused in him was Julia's.
Lucy interjected. "Hey, what are you-" But her lips sealed shut when Julia stood up and walked up to her with a barely-contained rage, backing Lucy against the wall, next to the windowsill seating. If the fact that Julia was a head taller than the Netrunner didn't scare her enough, she also had a damn Lexington gripped tight in her right hand.
Julia didn't say anything because she was too busy adding up the pros and cons of executing this girl with a single bullet between her eyes. So Lucy spoke up first as soon as her heart rate dropped below 200.
"You're welcome," she said, slowly bringing her fingers to her mouth and taking another drag of her cigarette.
"You could've killed him," Julia growled.
"He was dying."
"You. Could've. Killed him."
"If it weren't for me, he would've died long before you showed up," Lucy whispered. "When was that exactly?" She was shoved against the wall by the cold, hard steel of the pistol pinned against her sternum.
"Who are you?," Julia asked, her index finger a thousandth of an inch away from pulling the trigger. "Why did you help him?"
Lucy smiled. "Saka ICE. He tell you?"
"He did."
"You can stop with the pistol thing. It's hurting my chest. Why does anyone help anyone these days? I need him. Alive."
She could finally breathe easy when Julia stopped pinning her with the pistol, but only so that Julia could pistol-whip Lucy's skull. She writhed on the ground clutching her pained head, too much in pain to notice or do anything about the taller girl hastily securing her to a chair with duct tape. Blurry red code spluttered in her eyes but she was too slow- she couldn't quick hack when there was a billion different wires connected to the slots where her shards would be inserted into, each of them actively preventing the use of her programs.
And when Julia made sure Lucy couldn't hack, she hurried into her room, rustled around some bags and came out with a pair of small pruning shears. Held up in the air between her fingers so that Lucy would see it and fight against her restraints in a frenzy.
"Oh? You need him alive? Or your boss does?," Julia asked in a low voice.
"Aiden? AIDEN!," Lucy yelled. But he was dead still. Julia got in close and readied the two metal blades between Lucy's pinkie finger.
"Who do you work for?"
"Nobody- I swear, I-I'm just a friend! I-"
Julia didn't hesitate one bit. CRUNCH! SNAP!
"GAAAAHHHHH!," Lucy screamed as the blades sliced through skin and muscle and crunched through the delicate bone. Her screeches of agony echoed throughout the apartment and it could be heard five blocks down. But no one was knocking, not in this world. No one even bothered to get out of their beds as Lucy was getting tortured finger by finger. Julia moved on to Lucy's ring finger.
"Who do you work for?"
But Lucy didn't hear her. The world went quiet and she couldn't even hear her own sobbing because the pain was that bad. But she could feel the sharp metal closing in on her ring finger and she jolted her head up.
"NONONONO! NOT AGAIN!," Lucy wailed.
"Tell me who you work for."
Lucy let out a guttural screech of 'no's and disjointed phrases, all the while shaking her body violently. But just as Julia was about to let out her anger with the shears, a shorter than usual wire disconnected from Lucy's neck and they both heard the sound of a phone ringing in her BCI. Julia plugged her interface wire into Lucy and pressed her gun against Lucy's forehead.
"Pick it up," she ordered. Their eyes turned red.
...
"Lucy? Where are you chikita?"
She tried so hard not to scream her fixers name. She took a deep breath. "I'm just out for walk. T-This Ghost stuff is really messing with my mind."
"You sure you should be out? You're a wanted runner now, y'know that? Saka's gotcha ID'd."
"Yeah. I know. I'm fine, really. I brought my iron."
"Alright then. Get home safe, eh? Oh, and bring us back some beer too."
"Wait! Wait."
"What's up?"
"I...think I'm gonna quit being a Netrunner. And like...go live out in the sticks."
"Wha...ey, I don't mean to crush your dreams but that's bullshit. After everything you been through- after everything we did for you, you're not gonna see it through?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"I thought you wanted to catch the Ghost? It's all you'd talk about- Ghost this, Ghost that?"
Lucy looked at the gun, then back at Julia. "We'll talk about this later. See ya."
"Alright."
The call seemed to pacify the woman with the gun. She flicked up the safety, holstered it and went back to caring for Aiden- and by 'caring', that meant sitting on the coffee table in front of the couch and gently stroking Aiden's forehead every now and again. Like the fact that she just tortured a teenager never even happened.
"...hey...my finger. It's really hurting," Lucy groaned.
"Who are you?," Julia asked, a bit softer than the first time she asked.
"Lucyna...Ku-look, I'll tell you once you let me go and once I cauterize my hand, fair deal? I'm bleedin' out here."
"Kushinada?"
"Y-Yeah. How'd you know?"
Her whole demeanor changed like a switch has been flipped. "Aiden...mentioned you," she explained while freeing Lucy from her quadruple layered duct-tape restraints. "Not a whole lot but...you and the Saka ICE were always mentioned together."
"That's because the exploit was mine. My math, my notes, my everything. I just couldn't get one bit to work and Aiden...got it to work. After stealing it."
"Judging from the fact you just saved him, I'm guessing you're not out for revenge then?"
"No. I'm not." Julia, making sure she had a tight grip around Lucy's wrist, pulled a surprise bottle of vodka out of nowhere and poured it all over Lucy's wound without warning. "FUCK! ARRGH! OW!"
"Stay. Still."
"Hey, fuck you!," Lucy spat. "You crazy bitch- I saved your boyfriend and you torture me in return?!"
Julia sputtered. "Boy- he's not my boyfriend."
"Oh good~! So you're just a sadistic psychopath, is that it? You didn't think to let Aiden say who I was when he woke up?!"
"He's...particular about who he gets to know."
"Who are you, his caretaker or something?"
"Roommate, more like."
Lucy didn't want to admit it, but the more she talked, the more she was starting to warm up to the lady that just tortured her hours prior. She did understand what it was like to have someone she cared about being threatened. And as much as it did scare her and remind her never to fuck with Aiden or Julia ever, it was oddly humanizing. At the cost of a finger.
The pain dissipated throughout the night with the help of three beers per person and a local anaesthetic applied to her left hand. Lucy and Julia were sat by the windowsill, with all the lights off. Their eyes had adapted to the glow of Night City and the full moon shining into the apartment. Lucy took another swig as Julia asked another question.
"So...he tried to kill you?"
Lucy nodded. "I don't blame him. I would've done the same."
"Why? You were clearly on his side."
"Loose ends I suppose. Besides, when you're invisible like that it's easier just to fry someone and not have to worry about what they're gonna do, y'know?"
"Pfft. I don't believe he didn't know who you are. No way he thought you were gonna snitch."
"Like I said- I told him I was working for the Voodoo Boys," Lucy repeated and her eyes drifted to the couch. "Maybe that had something to do with it. Maybe there's bad blood between em'."
Julia shook her head and leaned forward. "That's the tenth time I caught you looking at that skinny fucker. What's up?"
"No- it's just...I'm curious. That's all," Lucy said.
"Uh huh. Well, I'm an open book. Ask away."
"He's not...dying is he?"
"He just needs medicine. A constant supply of it to keep his immune system from attacking itself. Heard of Typhoid Beta Complex? Hits ya' real young- leaves you bedridden and frail and makes your organs bleed."
"Seeing him in meatspace...he's like a different person."
"Yeah? If I was as weak as he was I'd be happy that I could run too- even if its a digital body."
"Is there a cure?"
"There is, but its- ha, 4.2 million eddies."
She choked on her beer, much to Julia's amusement. "4.2- you're kidding!"
"Wanna know the sad thing? Biotechnica made the disease, put it on an AV, 'crashed' the AV and now they sell the cure. Corps can get away with anything."
"No surprise there."
"God, these fucking corpos are selling the medicine and laughing their asses off all the way to the bank. I try, Lucy. I really do. But no matter how much I work, how many times I sell my body, I get paid fucking peanuts. And what about rent? Food? Debt?"
She graciously accepted one of Lucy's cigarettes and lit up. "If it weren't for Aiden...," she spoke with smoke in her mouth. "I don't know where I'd be."
"How did you guys meet?," Lucy asked. The question made Julia lower her eyes into the bottle she was sloshing. "I-If you don't mind."
"God...it was...well, I'm twenty-eight now so...eleven years ago. When I was seventeen. And he was fourteen."
"Woah."
"Yeah. We were such idiots back then. We were in school. Man, I fucking hated that little twerp- anyone could snap him in half yet he still had the respect of everyone around him. Just because he could hack. Anyway, I was dealing with a little family catastrophe during the time, and he uh...caught me crying behind the gym building."
Lucy stifled a laugh.
"Quiet. I guess, since...his parents died pretty young...he could understand what I was going through. Not that my parents are dead. But I really wished they would separate so that I don't get beaten every time I come home. So he pulled a couple of strings behind the scenes. Forged some texts, stole some money, planted some illegal material on their computers and eventually they couldn't take it anymore. They finally got a divorce. And soon enough, we both ran out of money to keep paying for everything so...we dropped out."
"Is that when you took on gigs?"
"Actually, I got a legit job, but yeah, Aiden got into the Netrunnin' scene pretty early on. Been like that ever since."
No matter how hard she tried, Lucy couldn't picture both of the odd people in school uniforms and sitting quietly in orderly rows, waiting until the bell rung. "It sounds like its been pretty rough," she replied.
"It has. You?"
"Huh?"
"What's your story?"
She winced. "I...don't really wanna talk about it."
"Ah. I understand."
Her beer was all but empty and her cigarette was a piece of styrofoam now. She looked at the clock: three am, more than enough time to sleep until her next shift. Julia lifted her long slender legs up from between Lucy's and hopped off the window sill. "Alright. I'm going to bed. We have a spare futon in the closet over there if you wanna stay. Goodnight."
"Night."
"Oh, and...sorry for cutting your finger off."
Lucy waved her left hand in dismissal. "It's fine. But you owe me a replacement."
"I sure do."