The second bullet missed. Or he was already in shock because David didn't feel a thing as he crashed into Lucy and knocked them both to the ground. Scattered pieces of the ninja's gun hit the concrete a moment later and told him what Lucy had done.
No pieces of the ninja though.
As quick as he could, David rolled off Lucy so she could point her gun at-
"Furhat?!"
The scav was just…there. Standing on the dockfront like he'd just happened to stroll by and found himself between them and the 'Saka operative. One hand held his stupidly long sword propped against his shoulder and the other was outstretched with a finger and his thumb pinching…a…bullet…
The bastard ignored all three of the Night City residents gaping at him and just turned his wrist to get a better look at the rifle round he'd plucked out of the air. Inadvertently giving David a clear look at where it had deformed around his fingertips, like mud instead of metal.
Then he shrugged and tossed it away to bounce across the concrete. The noise must have snapped the ninja out of his daze because he blurred backwards into a crouch with his gun pointed at the scav and his eyes alight with an active call signal.
Furhat ignored him completely.
Instead of dealing with the ninja, or giving any sign he was bothered by the gun pointed at his back, he turned and said, "My name is Law. Not…furhat." Then he bent down briefly to pick up another bullet off the ground, this one flattened into a nub of metal, and looked from it to David. "Glori-ya said you'd be in trouble. She didn't say anything about you being bulletproof."
Reminded of the first bullet, and the throbbing pain in his back, David groped around behind himself and stifled a moan of despair when his fingers found a shattered crater in the Sandy. Then his brain caught up with what the fuck fur- Law, had just said.
"Glori-, m-my mom asked you to-!?"
"Bullet hit the metal?" Law asked the air, ignoring David's sputtering. "Even here, D's are lucky. Huh."
He must have been trying to say the most insane shit he could possibly string together, because then he turned to look at David again and said, "Glori-ya is healing well, and she's joined my crew."
"She what?!"
"After she stopped thinking we were selling our patients' metal, she asked to join, and I said yes." Then, voice still as flat and even as a corpo media talking about yesterday's crime stats, he said, "You ready to come back yet, or you still got errands to take care of?"
David just gaped at him, the world having turned over on itself one too many times in the last thirty seconds for him to find any words at all. Though at least Lucy was making a similar kind of face when he looked to her for sanity.
It was the ninja's eyes dimming that finally snapped him out of it. Too late.
The bastard rose and jabbed his gun in the direction of all three of them. Sneering through his mask so hard David could hear it when he said, "None of you are going anywhere. Now-"
Law's eyes flicked towards him, and the ninja stopped talking, or breathing.
"You shot one of my crew's kid." Was all he said.
Then it was over.
Law's backhand was too fast to see. His arm was bent against his chest. Then it was straight and the ninja was gone. And so was the equipment shed. And the containers behind it. The rubble was tumbling half a block away before the noise hit in a solid crak of shattered air that felt like a hammer to David's ears.
He had just enough time to see the wall of Arasaka military hardware revealed by the destruction -tanks, turrets, and too many soldiers to count, with AVs rising up behind them- before they answered Law with a solid wall of fire and fury.
The sheer sound of it sent David to the ground, Lucy clutching her ears right alongside him this time, while the firepower met a wall of concrete that hadn't existed when they opened fire.
One of Law's fingers was crooked upwards when David looked at him, and the…doctor? Whatever he was, Law wasn't even looking at the army Arasaka had sent to kill him. Instead he shifted his grip on his sword from one hand to the other so he could pull off his long coat and toss the mass of fur and fabric over them.
The air tinted a little blue as it settled across them and the sound went from agonising to just loud.
Law, who was a lot bigger than David had realised when he had a top on, just said, "You two should wrap up. It gets cold by the sea."
Then he turned and started walking up a set of steps that had appeared in the side of the concrete wall he'd pulled out of the ground. Directly into the wall of bullets and bombs and every other kind of kinetic death a megacorp could throw around.
Only, instead of turning into a headless corpse, Law just kept walking. Like it was all just a light rain, except even that would have burned his skin and David couldn't see a mark on him. Just unbroken skin and the dark lines of his tattoos. Hearts on either shoulder and a round face stretched across his back with a grin that seemed to mock the corporation spending countless eddies with every second of the onslaught that wasn't even slowing him down.
Then he was on top of the wall, in full view of it all, and in a instant trails of smoke appeared from the sky down to a few feet from where his free hand was splayed out against the air, while a dozen colossal explosions sent up geysers of sea water out in the bay.
The AVs rose up high enough to pour gunfire and rockets down on him. Even more missile trails appeared. Off to the side David saw even more tanks pull up to the waterfront coast and turn their guns to fire again and again at Law.
None of it made him move. None of it even made him flinch.
He just stood tall and the more David looked up at him the more he seemed to loom over the army. Over the entire city skyline.
Until David would have sworn the face grinning on Law's back had eclipsed Night City itself.
Then, as suddenly as it began, the bullets ran dry.
For a moment there was stillness. Though when David looked at one of the tanks that was in his line of sight the men around it certainly looked like they were banging on it and shouting.
Then the blue tint in the air vanished and Law stomped the wall of concrete he'd created back into the ground as shouts and screams and clanging metal were suddenly audible to David again. Lucy perked up beside him from where she'd been pressed to the ground, the netrunner looking extremely surprised to be alive, but before either of them could say a word, and long before any of the 'Saka forces could get more ammunition, Law switched the hand he was holding his sword's sheath with and wrapped long fingers around the weapon's handle for the first time.
He swept it out in a single horizontal cut, and bisected…everything.
Every soldier. Every tank. Every transport and turret and field fortification. And every single building in the waterfront, all the way to the edge of the district off in the distance. Even the AVs.
All of them split in half and flew apart like he'd shoved a giant wedge through the lot of them.
It was impossible. Which was Law's cue to slam his sword back into the sheath and reach out to twist at the air with one hand, sending everything he'd cut spinning into the air like it was caught in a tornado without any trace of wind.
It all just flew through the air. Tracing the shape of an immense dome with Law at the centre of it all.
Then he started to gesture at the air, obviously manipulating a virtual display, and the pieces began to fly back together. Sticking together wherever he had cut them apart, with no regard for whether they'd been connected before. Torsos stuck to walls, tank halves stuck to bisected buildings, and all the while every living component kept screaming horror -but not, David thought faintly, anything that sounded like pain- as Law built a mad tower from it all.
As suddenly as everything Law had done, it was over. Most of the buildings and containers he had cut had found their way back to where they had started with no sign of damage, while the rest…the rest was something out of a nightmare.
Something that should not have existed and looked ready to collapse at any moment, like an insane artist had built a tower ten floors high in the middle of the district. A tower with some kind of unifying theme that he could see but not quite put his finger on, until Lucy spoke up for the first time since the world went mad around them. Her voice tight with terror that he vaguely thought he should be feeling too.
"It's all…They're all, 'Saka."
Sure enough, as David looked he could see the same logo repeated on every thing Law had used to build it.
As messages went, it wasn't subtle.
But he was already pretty sure that Law was not a subtle sort of man.
He was also increasingly certain that the feeling that had filled his chest as he watched Law fight had not been terror at all.
More like awe.
More like longing.
More like…a dream.
Then the man in question was strolling back towards them and David fought to stop imagining himself in Law's place atop the wall, just in case his crazy tech included something that let him read minds.
Though other than the virtual interface David hadn't seen any hint of the tech itself. Almost like it was just Law doing it all.
Like he had super powers or some scopshit like that.
"Ready to go?" Law pulled him out of his thoughts again, and set Lucy shaking beside him.
On instinct David stepped slightly forward and to the side to get between them, even if it was futile and pointless all at once.
He nodded for the both of them and opened his mouth to verbalise the same, but they were already somewhere else.
00:12:46
00:12:47
00:12:48
Gloria was counting the seconds, fifteen minutes into trying to decide if she should go get another of the crew (her crew, now, maybe) or keep waiting for Law, when three bodies appeared around her.
Law, halfway into putting his coat on, an Edgerunner with eyes blown panic-wide, and-
"Mijo!" Her crutches hit the floor and she almost knocked David down after them. Crushing her son to her collarbone hurt like hell, but she'd be damned if she let him go just for that.
Instinctively she tried to ping his implants for any injuries, and hissed through her teeth when a bold red popup reminded her of the jammer. Instead she went old school, patting him down with gentle speed until she was sure he had nothing worse than a nasty bruise on his face and another at the base of his spine.
Another miracle in a week that had had more of them than days, so far.
All thanks to her new boss.
Who she was ignoring, after he saved her son's life.
Swearing fluently in the privacy of her head, Gloria spun to face him as best as she could with only one working leg and found him offering her crutches back to her.
"Thank you sir. Sorry for my rudeness, it won't happen again." She babbled as she took the crutches back and tried to stand straight and attentive.
The finger thrust in her face told her the fuck up was not forgiven, but what her new boss actually said was, "Oi. This isn't the Navy. Don't go calling me Sir, or Boss, or Mr Trafalgar, or whatever."
He poked her lightly between the eyes and continued, "My name is Law. My crew calls me Captain. Pick one."
"Sorry Captain."
"And stop apologising."
"Sor-" She caught herself and took a breath to adjust her thoughts. Despite the power Law had, and the title he went by, and him clearly being her boss, she was increasingly sure that he was more of Edgerunner crew leader than a Gangoon boss or Corpo exec. So what she should be saying was, "Thank you Captain. You saved David's life, didn't you."
Her little street kid would never have let her hold him for that long unless he'd just been through hell, and the Edgerunner girl looked far too experienced to be so wide eyed and quiet unless things had been very very bad.
Law just shrugged.
"It was past time I sent a message. All I really did for your kid was grab a bullet." He shrugged again and added, "Kept some others from going near him." like those were words that people said, in that order.
For all that the word bullet about stopped her heart, Gloria trusted her exam. David wasn't shot and at a glance the Edgerunner was fine too. Still, she had to swallow several outbursts before she managed to say to David as calmly as she could, "Explain. What did you get yourself into D?"
That did get a defensive reaction from him, arms crossed and brow furrowed like they were back in her rusted old Galena.
"I didn't do anything. 'Saka wanted to stuff me full of poison gas and zero this guy. So they came after me. Lucy got caught up in it too."
"They came after you?! With what?"
"…Everything?"
That had her looking back to Law for an actual explanation, but all he did was shake his head and say, "The message was overdue."
"Well they definitely got it now." David said, grinning at Law. "Don't see them missing a tower of gonks and gear all diced up and stuck together like that."
The grin Law gave in return would have been terrifying even without what David had just said, but he forestalled any further questions with a raised hand and, "I have to get back to work."
She straightened up on her crutches but again he spoke first, pointing at her as he said, "You get back to bed and don't get up again until your leg is fixed." Then David, "You go with her." Finally his attention turned to the Edgerunner -Lucy, she guessed- and the younger woman steeled herself like she was facing down a military mech.
Gloria doubted Law missed the way her hand was inching towards the pouch on her hip, though she wasn't so sure he would recognise the monowire reel she had primed in the same motion.
Law hardly seemed concerned by any of it. He just looked her over with a clinical eye and said, "You're not injured." The Edgerunner's tension ratcheted to the brink of violence, and Gloria braced to throw her and David out of the way, only for Law to shrug and turn his back on all three of them.
"Stick with those two, and you can leave with the other patients. Tomorrow morning."
The girl relaxed a good deal, but David shouted after Law before he could get more than a few steps.
"The hell?! You're just throwing her to the wolves!"
Law stopped, turning his head enough to look at David out of the corner of his eye. "Hm?"
"You saw what Arasaka threw my way, and you think they won't go after her?! And everyone else you let off this boat for that matter!"
Torn between the urge to berate her son for his tone, and her sense that he was right, Gloria hoped that her read on Law's temper was right and held her tongue.
He turned his head away from them again, then tipped it back in thought for a long moment before he spoke up and affirmed her growing faith in him yet again.
"Alright. I'll do something about the patients we let off tomorrow, and the others." He turned to face them and said, "As for you, if you're staying then it'll be in the brig."
David opened his mouth and this time Law's gaze shifted to him before he could speak.
"Glori-ya is on my crew now. You're her kid." His eyes went back to the Edgerunner. "You, I don't know. So brig, or the city. Which will it be?"
"Can I-" Her voice was a little hoarse, but after starting quiet and breaking off she finally seemed to realise that Law wasn't as volatile as she'd been treating him and the Edgerunner continued more confidently, "Can I leave now? To somewhere other than where you got us?"
Law nodded and the girl turned to David before he could protest. "David, it's fine. I've gone to ground before, and there's no place like Night City if you wanna hide." Her eyes flicked to Gloria for a moment, and she had the strange impression that the girl knew her, somehow. "Plus, I owe my crew a head's up. 'Saka will be coming after them too, and Maine would do the same for me," she paused, while Gloria was considering the chances of a coincidence, then muttered, "whatever Kiwi says."
Which made it a certainty. "Maine's new kid? That's you?"
Lucy frowned and looked like she had something to say, then thought better of it and just grit out, "Sure."
Whatever her malfunction was, D was looking at her in a way that Gloria liked even less now she knew she was running with a serious crew.
The path she had wanted for her son might be a smoking crater, but getting pulled into the orbit of anyone who hung out at the Afterlife was a whole other level of fucked. Lucky for her, Law's patience had run thin enough that he triggered his teleportation field thing before either of the teenagers could say anything else, blinking both of them away and leaving Gloria to hobble back to the recovery room with her son in tow.
Only when she got back and found Ikkaku leaning against the wall beside the door did it occur to her that she had no idea how any of Law's crew would feel about her sudden recruitment. They all seemed to be from the same place after all, and she had just enough time to start worrying before Ikkaku hit her in a hug that felt like it rebroke her ribs and collarbone both.
"Ow, ow, ow!" She yelped.
Ikkaku flinched back like she was on fire, horrified and apologetic as she said, "Shit, I forgot you-! Anyway, are you alright?!"
After a few moments to pat herself down Gloria was sure she'd just gotten bruises from the shorter (and shockingly strong) woman's enthusiasm. Which was enough to reignite it, as Ikkaku threw an arm around her and smoothly replaced her crutch on that side.
"Sorry. Sorry. I'm just so glad not to be the only woman on the crew any more!"
"So it's not…a problem?"
Ikkaku looked up and to the side at her with a furrowed brow, then her eyes widened and her grin followed.
"The Captain stuck that on you." She waved her free hand at the patch on Gloria's medical gown. "That's enough for all of us, so don't worry about a thing. Welcome to the Heart Pirates!"
Then she turned her intensity onto David, blasting past the morose look he'd been wearing since Law got rid of the- of Lucy.
Ikkaku pointed to herself and said something that might have started with an 'An' sound. When he looked at the woman like she was crazy she scowled and fiddled with her translator before saying, "It means big sis."
David just looked at her with the sort of skepticism only teenagers and corpo medias could muster and said, "How old are you?"
The woman's fist rose into the air like she was going to bop David on the head. Then she stopped and looked embarrassed and worried for a moment. "I keep forgetting you're not, uh, one of the guys."
It wasn't like a playful hit would actually hurt him, so Gloria was happy to shrug off the habit, while David looked annoyed that she hadn't let him have it if anything.
Teenage machismo was the bane of her existence some days.
Lucky her that he was such a good boy most of the time, hurrying to push the door open ahead of them while Ikkaku helped her to smoothly navigate her remaining crutch through the doorway.
It felt like months since she'd seen the recovery room, but nothing had changed in the brief time she'd been away.
Had it really just been a half hour or so? Her internal clock blinked determinedly back at her when she looked at it, but it seemed impossible.
Everything had changed, yet here she was back in the same sturdy cot, tugging at her flimsy gown to keep from giving the Arasaka suit a free show from where he was staring at the symbol she now wore on her breast.
The symbol of the 'Heart Pirates' she supposed.
The name felt right. Strong and kind and free. Somehow.
But after Ikkaku had finished efficiently checking David over and slapped on some bandages smeared in the miraculous medicine Gloria was actually going to get to use, she couldn't help but feel impatient. Annoyed at having to go back to lying in bed with her busted leg and a medical gown instead of actual clothes.
The magnetic fastener strip was digging into her back and she could feel the texture of the sheets right through the thin material. Not to mention the oily gaze of the exec and the uncomfortably assessing looks his bodyguards were giving her.
Then there were all the things she was noticing now she had the bandwidth available for paying attention to the other patients.
David was sleeping peacefully, but three people she could see were tossing and turning, all making the telltale motions of someone whose nerve connections had loosened. Two had cyberarms and the third had a chrome leg that must have been crushed in the crash. All three were wincing and tensing their muscles where flesh met chrome. Gloria knew exactly how to fix it but…
"Fuck it." She snarled. Then she sat up and grabbed her crutches, paying no mind to her gown coming undone as she stumbled through drawing the curtain around her bed and heaved the tub of her things up onto the mattress.
There was no hope of getting anything on her lower half with the cast in the way, but she balanced on one leg long enough to get a shirt on, and used her belt to reinforce the gown's fastener. Her jacket had vanished along with Lucy but as she slipped her good foot into one of her boots Gloria felt like a Medtech again.
Even if, technically, she was only an EMT. With the salary to show for it.
She put her socks onto the foot of one of her crutches to soften the sound, then headed across to the first of her patients.
Once she washed up with some wipes left out on a side table, Gloria got to work. The disposable plastic knife she had begged off Shachi to scratch inside her cast was all she needed to pry open the warped seam in the woman's shoulder. Then it was a simple matter of reaching inside with the same implement and popping the loose connections in, one after another.
Luckily it was just the major connectors and the patient settled down to sleep peacefully as soon as the last of them clicked home.
The second one woke up with her halfway through wiggling off the cover plate on his hip. In turn, he got halfway through throwing a punch before he noticed the patch on her chest and went very very still.
Gratifying as she found the reaction versus the usual response to a CityMed employee, Gloria was quick to lean down and whisper an explanation.
He looked more than a little wary of her, but he didn't shout or scream or refuse to keep his leg still while she wrestled the panel off and set to work, finding a more complicated set of problems thanks to a Ripper who must never have heard the term 'cable management' before, but still nothing she couldn't deal with.
By the time she was done her patient had gone from worried to impatient, and the gonk didn't bother thanking her before he rolled over and went back to sleep.
Still, she was feeling good. Old passion for the work buoying her through the frustrations and magnifying the triumphs.
She still swore violently when her improvised tool snapped in half rather than pry open the seams of the much fancier cyberarm on the Silverhand wannabe with enough branding on his gear to make the real deal spew chunks.
Which was when one of her new coworkers popped up. Hakugan was a silent man who she'd been meaning to thank ever since Shachi pointed him out to her and mentioned he had been the one to pull her son out of the wreckage of her car. He wore a smiling full face mask and didn't say a word as he offered her a scalpel in one hand and a narrow headed screwdriver with the other.
She took both and began to quietly explain what she was doing, low enough that not even the snoring 'Rockerboy' would have been able to overhear them.
Three hours later, as she stood outside the recovery room holding the door while Clione -whose long pointed hat made Shachi's look downright fashionable- pushed the laundry trolley out into the hall as quietly as he could, she found herself face to face with Law once again.
"Captain." She acknowledged, hoping he had forgotten that he told her to get some rest.
He just shook his head with an exasperated sigh and pointed towards her bed.
Blushing and trying not to feel like a misbehaving child, Gloria almost missed what he said to Clione as she crutched her way back to bed.
"That settles it."
"Settles what Captain?"
"She's definitely one of you idiots."
"Dunno what you're talking about Captain. The Heart Pirates just follow our Captain's example."
Whatever Law grumbled after that, she didn't hear it.
Whether because she was too far away, or because she was just too happy to pay attention, Gloria couldn't say.
"To a job well done!"
As the entire crew cheered their response to Shachi's toast, David wondered if he'd ever seen his mom so happy before.
Back when he was a kid, she'd used to bring him along to work with her.
Forget about creche pods. They'd been too broke even for one of the overcrowded mega-apartments with an old lady watching kids for a couple ennies an hour. So he'd been stashed in whatever corner his mom could hide him, with a flickering old tablet and the bigger half of whatever she'd gotten from a vending machine that day.
Whenever she could, she'd slip away to check on him, always showing him a holo-smile so wide she'd had to close her eyes. Only when she thought he wasn't looking did she let the smile fade away, and open hollow eyes.
Those eyes had been what pushed him to start studying so hard. He'd seen the brief flashes of real joy that lit her face up when he got a perfect score, or beat a record set by some spoiled corpo heir and…
He sipped his soda with a grimace as much at his own naivety as at the carbonation. Their naivety really, because his mom had bought into the fairy tale even more than he had.
Once she realised that it wasn't a fluke, or a phase, she'd thrown him into every program and scholarship and contest that would take him.
Her eyes hadn't brightened, but a fire had deepened the shadows in them. Burning fiercer every time she got passed over for better jobs. For training and opportunities and all the things he dimly remembered -back when she'd had no official qualification at all and her jobs had been whatever scop she could find to shovel- her telling him the EMT certs would get her.
She'd saved and spent to buy him textbooks and lessons and then tuition at Arasaka Academy itself. While her own textbooks and revision guides went out of date and she stopped talking about the Medtech certs.
Instead of believing in herself, she'd pinned her hopes on him, and he'd deluded himself that it was enough for her to have any hope at all.
Now, it was like the last few days had shocked them both awake from a long dream.
Except while he was reeling from it, his mom was flourishing.
He'd woken up to find her looking healthier than she'd been before the crash, chatting with the weird mask guy and 'big sis' while they checked her leg. Mask had given her a thumbs up and she'd cracked a joke about it being universal, then demanded they cut her free right away.
She'd hardly had the cast off long enough to throw on pants before she'd thrown herself into the last push to get the patients discharged. Only stopping to ruffle his hair and push him back into bed whenever he tried to get up. When he told her he wanted to help, she'd shot back that he looked exhausted and he'd be no help half-asleep.
He could have convinced her, if he hadn't kept passing out halfway through those arguments.
Instead, he'd only woken up properly after the Heart Pirates had finished their work, alone and useless, lying in the only bed not stripped to the mattress, and he'd still had to drag himself out of it. His mom might not have needed his help, but thoughts of Lucy were there to pull him to his feet with a creeping fear in his gut. Fear that the moonlight-haired girl was in danger while he was safe in Law's floating fortress.
His mom had found him pacing the corridor outside the recovery room -unnaturally cavernous and empty when he was the only one in it- and ushered him through the ship until they reached a canteen. Long tables and benches were bolted to the floor of a room that was four times the size of the recovery room and infinitely less creepy thanks to the fifteen jumpsuits filling the space with the beginnings of a party.
Their Captain was sprawled out on a bench in the corner with his sword out of his hand for the first time that David had seen. He might have looked almost peaceful if he hadn't been scowling down at something, and if his sword hadn't been on the table beside him.
After seeing how his mom looked at Lucy, David hadn't been dumb enough to bring her up within her earshot, but he hadn't had to wait long for a chance to speak to Law while his mom went to help the jumpsuits unload booze out of crates stamped with the name of some fancy club. Half a dozen of them were working together to pile bottles onto the long tables, while the smell of something delicious began to fill the air.
When he wandered over, David found Law holding a corded phone handset, wire cut and the rest nowhere in sight. He must have been pissed about the damage, because the glare he had aimed at the ancient tech was murderous.
He also must have seen David coming a mile away, because before he could say a word Law had reached into his pocket and pulled out a shard. Holding it out between two fingers, loosely enough for the letters scratched lightly into the side to be visible.
'D…A…V' was as far as it got, but it was enough.
He had thanked Law and made for the most isolated corner of the room, snagging a can of water on the way and slotting the shard as soon as he had some semblance of privacy.
"Hey-hi David." Lucy's voice filled his head. "I'm leaving this with the biopsycho, so I don't have much-much span. I-" There was a sudden cut. "Thanks for coming back for me. Next time we got-gotta hang without so many 'Saka trash. Deal?"
The recording ended and a text file auto-transferred to his agent. When he opened it he found a picture of Lucy's head, stylised, winking, and rendered entirely in text characters.
Below the picture it read, 'Don't worry. Like I told you, I know how to hide.'
Then the file deleted itself, and the shard in his neck ejected in a squeal of static and burned plastic. He grabbed for the slot and found it undamaged, but when he ran a diagnostic to be sure he found one last message embedded in the error message that popped up in his vision.
An intersection in Kabuki and a two minute voucher for terminal access, locked to a brand he'd never heard of before. That was all she'd left him.
At least it hung around long enough for him to snap a still.
But whatever she'd meant him to understand, David could read the truth behind it.
Lucy didn't need his help either.
Even discovering he'd grabbed the wrong can wasn't enough to make him want to get up off the bench. So he just sat and watched the world getting further and further away.
David sipped his can of chemicals and fizz and watched his mom laughing and joking with the rest of the Heart Pirates. Slowly realising just how much happier she was without him in the picture.
He wondered how much sooner she might have found a crew she fit in with if she hadn't had him dragging her down. Then he got up and swapped his nicola for a can of beer. Nobody was paying attention anyway, so David decided that if nobody needed him to play the perfect student any more then he might as well enjoy it.
Beer turned out to taste a lot less bitter than nicola, and nothing like as sickly sweet. If it didn't fizz unpleasantly in his mouth David might have said he liked it, so he set the can aside to let it go flat.
And looked up from the can to find his mom looking down at him.
Miserable or not, he still jerked in surprise. Brain going from slightly fuzzy to crystal clear as he cast around for an excuse.
He was still looking for it when Gloria collapsed next to him with a gale of laughter. Eventually she choked out, "Mijo, your face!" before continuing to laugh while he grew steadily redder.
"It's just one beer." He muttered, feeling humiliated and useless and smaller than he could remember feeling, ever.
Something about that must have shown, because she sobered fast and said carefully, "I'm not mad D. Not like you aren't old enough. That was never the reason, it was just-"
"Needed to keep my grades up. I know mom."
The memory of past arguments loomed almost as large as the past tense did.
His mom stayed silent, so David said what she wouldn't. "The Academy isn't an option. I can't go back."
"Not even if we had the money." She agreed, the words bitter and glad at the same time.
He supposed that it was like she'd said in the car, just before everything went to shit. That place treated them both like shit. He'd just been too self-centred to remember it. Too caught up in telling himself he hadn't fucked up.
He glanced over at Law, then looked at the party bubbling around them, and for a moment the gratitude that they had kept those from being the last words his mom heard from him was stronger than anything else he was feeling.
"Isn't this better?" He said. "It's your dream."
She stayed silent, and her eyes refused to brighten. So he was glad when the doors opened and a giant stepped into the canteen.
As distractions went, an impossibly tall and wide and just generally mountain-shaped man was certainly a good one.
Law was tall, and the white furry exotic was inhumanly huge, and a couple of the other jumpsuits were built on the same scale as those two were. The man who walked into the canteen dwarfed all of them put together. He was tall enough to look through the first floor window of most buildings in Night City and he didn't even have the decency to be skinny. Instead he was built like a tank, or maybe a bunker.
The living building was wearing one of the crew's familiar jumpsuits, fitted perfectly for his monstrously huge frame, and helping another three jumpsuits -normal sized ones- to push a fleet of trolleys piled high with trays and pots and other things that smelled impossibly good.
He set to work piling the contents onto the tables that filled the canteen, so much food that David wasn't even sure it would all fit, and between the feast and the giant David almost missed the other trolley.
It was the way most of the Heart Pirates stared at it that drew his eye to it. This one didn't have any giant containers, just two trays of small covered bowls. Bowls that were being handed out to the jumpsuits, one to each of them or to a spot near the ones still setting up the food, with no sign that he or his mom were getting one.
Then they got to Law, and a quiet battle played out beneath the clattering of plates and pans. The Captain was offered the last three bowls, where even the giant had only gotten one. He handed two of them back with an angry look and words David couldn't make out from across the room.
The bear man, who David hadn't realised was in the room, let alone sitting a few feet from the Captain, handed back his own bowl while Law was arguing. Then met the Captain's gaze evenly when he whirled to point his glare at the exotic.
Finally the Captain of the Heart Pirates admitted defeat. He took back the other two bowls and snarfed all three so quickly that David wasn't even sure if they contained a liquid or solid.
Like that was a signal, the rest of the jumpsuits snatched up their bowls and put them down empty. A few with longing eyes lingering on the containers and hands hesitating to let go.
"Bioware supplements?" His mom muttered beside him, calling David back to reality and drawing his attention back to her. "The energy…density…" She trailed off with a long look down at herself that he couldn't begin to understand, and by the time he looked up the bowls were stacked and shoved into a corner while Law stood up and raised a glass, commanding attention as easily as that.
He had a slight smile quirking at his lips, standing casually and still holding the busted phone, but nobody said a word as looked around at all of them.
That gaze met David's for a moment, and the approval in it didn't waver.
Then he raised his glass in a toast and simply said, "Good job everyone."
This time the cheers were so loud that David took a moment to realise that he'd joined in with them. Something in him was buoyed above his gloom by even secondhand approval from the man who had faced down Arasaka like they were barely worth his time. Then the pirates started pulling lids off trays and pots and the wall of sensation wiped any other thoughts from his head.
Beneath the metal was food like David had hardly seen and only eaten scraps of. In quantities that, that just couldn't be real. Thinking back to the thin slice of real meat or chunk of semi-fresh fruit his mom had brought home a few times a year, David couldn't quite believe that he was looking at entire roasted animals and bowls of fruit and things he couldn't quite make sense of because they looked like meals he had eaten and seen but the smell and even the look was alien in the best possible way.
It was like being in a film. Or one of those braindances of impossible luxuries like a hotel room with a view of the earth or dancing through rain that didn't burn or sting.
The idea of actually eating any of it didn't even occur to him. His mom standing beside him with the same bone deep certainty that touching any of the food would get them arrested or plunged into debt or-
"What are you waiting for?" Shachi yelled over the shouting and laughing and clattering of cutlery.
In perfect sync, both NC residents looked from him to the food and back to him.
"You mean-?" "Can we-?"
He laughed at their confusion and pointed to two of the crew who had brought the food in.
"If you don't, our cooks will be asking what was wrong with it."
"But-"
A giant head appeared from the sky. The man mountain leaned down to say, with a voice that rumbled slightly less than David had expected, "It's good to be polite, but when food is put in front of you the polite thing is to eat it."
Then he offered them an entire chicken. Plump and crisp-skinned and David was tearing off a leg before he could think about it any more. His mom digging in right beside him.
The taste was juicy and rich with spices and just, delicious. It felt like fireworks going off in his brain. Dorph could not possibly be as good as that first bite of chicken. The second bite was even better.
He grabbed his beer, gone nice and flat, and washed it down. While a few of the crew finished setting up a damn weird looking sound system and started playing something fast and cheerful and old but also unlike anything he'd heard before.
Someone started singing, he had another drink, and things started to get blurry after that.
Moments swam out of the haze.
Most of them involved food.
...
His mom telling him he should drink more of something, and a pirate -Clione! He remembered long after he resorted to calling the man 'weird hat guy'- telling her that the hangover would teach him that lesson.
...
Delicious food.
...
Law getting a call on his broken phone, then grabbing his sword and vanishing.
...
More food. And drinks.
...
Everyone singing, the translators making an even bigger mess out of the chaos of twenty voices all out of time with one another.
...
Mostly drinks, because the food was gone by then.
...
Hugging the cooks, and trying to show them a laserpop dance move that he'd seen a classmate with a new skill chip show off between classes.
...
Even more drinks.
...
Then he was stumbling out of the toilet with a deep sense of triumph that he had found it without anyone's help. It only took him three attempts to make sense of the directions -and twice that many encounters with locked doors- so David felt justified in the smug smile he wore as he opened the door to find-
Darkness.
Had they turned out the lights in the canteen? He didn't see why anyone would do that, but the room was the right size and shape and he'd taken the right turns. 'And the left turns too.' He chuckled to himself, counting back the stairs in his head and confirming that he'd gone up twenty three steps and then down the next set of stairs in seventeen little jumps and the ones after that in five jumps and one fall. So he was in the right place.
Everyone else must just have gotten lost.
As he groped his way through the dark, David found proof that he was in the canteen, amidst all the shiny metal someone had dumped everywhere while he was taking a piss, there was an open box with a perfect fresh bundle of grapes in it.
They had a spiralling pattern to them, like nothing he'd seen before. Which put them in the same category as most of what he'd eaten that night.
Words swam back to him out of the soup that filled his head.
"When food is…in front of you…" He mumbled to himself with a few wet burps, before he reached out and pulled off a grape with a lot more effort than he'd expected to need.
Then he popped it in his mouth, and bit down.
With a loud crak David felt at least one of his teeth break.
The pain brought him halfway to sober, but he hardly noticed it through his revulsion at the taste.
It was worse than anything he'd ever eaten. Worse than anything anyone could possibly eat. So bad that he could only understand the taste as pure revulsion. So bad that he couldn't even vomit.
So bad that he swallowed it.
The taste vanished and the pain in his jaw felt distant. The grape felt impossibly heavy in his stomach and it was all just too much.
Drunk and in pain and entirely done with being conscious, David Martinez slumped forward onto the mound of gold he'd crawled onto, and passed out.