Comm's check
'Really, when you got right down to it. Even assaulting a Scav hideout was simple when you planned everything out in advance.'
The blue and green structure twisted and turned in his eyes as every step of the raid was played out in front of him. Entrances highlighted and a pleasant Fuchsia colored arrow showing the best place to park his truck and minotaur. Sometimes he felt a little bad about that, being the last one into the fight. Constantly protected by the bulletproof panels between him and the rest of the action. Still it wasn't like things where totally safe for him in a firefight, or even that his hands weren't bloody by the time a battle was over.
…No he had his own share of the danger, and the others certainly never begrudged him when they had to pull back and find cover behind the truck. The minotaur as well had been a huge addition to his firepower, and despite Motoko's advisements he couldn't see himself giving up on the role that let him confidently stroll into the middle of a fight and turn things around before someone he cared about got hurt. He couldn't stand to see anyone he liked in pain, never could.
He rested his back against the chair he was sitting in, all of them packed into Motoko's den. Tapping his fingers against the cheap plastic chair he'd taken from her brothers room. He'd really come a long way hadn't he?
When he was younger his grandmother had practically raised him herself. He remembered spending a lot of his early days idly shifting his stare between whatever was on the net that day, and the front door. His grandma had run a little electronics stall out in Kabuki back then, hocking yesterday's advanced tech as little more then scrap one could buy for a couple hundred eddies a piece. It wasn't a lot, but it was a living, and a living was what they needed.
They were never rich, no kid in Night City. Not even the actually rich ones would claim that, but they where what Ichi would have called comfortable.
Would have, if he didn't have to see what that 'comfort' cost. His grandmother was in great health for a woman of her age, but she was still old, and the stand she worked at didn't have a single solid wall between it and the sometimes 80 kph winds that swept through the gaps between buildings during the long winters. Some nights she'd hobble into their home, legs stiff and scarf wrapped so tightly around her neck that you'd almost think she couldn't breathe. The sight was always enough to rob whatever warm comfort their place offered him.
He knew some of his chooms would probably laugh at him for that. Of all the things to be terrified of in the city inclement weather seemed pretty far down the list, but it was the terror he'd grown up with. The one young impressionable Ichi saw the most of, one that eventually wore him down enough to make him almost numb to the terror of being handed a gun for the first time and told to point it down the street.
A gun meant risk sure, but risk meant money.
Money paid the heating bills.
He figured it was like that for most, not Motoko certainly. Who had always talked about reputation until suddenly coming back one day as a completely different person.
He missed his old friend sometimes, the one who'd drag him to a dingy bar and then go on about motorcycles and katana's for so long that he'd forget about everything else for awhile. Still being honest with himself, he much preferred the new Motoko. The one who paid him enough to keep his lights on for a year without so much as blinking an eye. The one who'd back him up if he was ever in any trouble, the one who'd swing by a takeout place on her way home so he could pick up food for his grandmother.
It was the little things you know, that let you know when a choom was really a choom. The old Motoko, maybe she was just never in a position to really offer, he certainly hadn't been. The new Motoko though? You almost had to restrain her from paying the bill. From knocking out the punk attempting to picksocket you on the street. From giving you more eddies then you knew what to do with.
That made him sound like a horrible choom. One who took from others but never offered in return. That wasn't quite what he was, or what he liked to think of himself as, so he tried to make up for it by being right there when she needed him. The thing was she just almost never did.
So instead he did the only things he could think of to help her. He drove, and when that wasn't enough he'd read. Studying any manuals he could find online about anything he thought might be useful.
He wasn't quite sure where Motoko found the time to study and learn as much as she did. Maybe she just didn't sleep most nights? Had to be something like that. He did his best to catch up, at a reasonable pace. No sense ruining his health the same way grandma had when he didn't need to, but surely and slowly he was learning. One day he'd have the answer Motoko was looking for.
It was the little things after all.
So this seems short, but it kind of got away from me a little bit. At first I was going to write something 'haha' funny. Then decided I wanted to do a little bit of character work, and who is largely unexplored but poor ol' Ichinose. The guy who cares for his grandmother, and the one sane rock holding the rest of section 9 down.
I almost wanted to write more but decided to cut if off there because it felt like too good of a place to stop. Whether or not this is close to the actual character of Ichi? Who knows. Still it was fun to write, and I liked coming up with a backstory for him that wasn't 'random tragedy #458.' He's just a kid who has lived a hard life. Reprioritized things correctly, and then had Motoko lift him out of the way of the threshers that are the street gangs.
Hope things are going better for you Seras! And that reading something slightly melancholic helps you feel better the same way it does me.
If not, uh...Sorry?