Chapter Text
V wakes up to a blinding light. One big light so bright it hurts. Blurred silhouettes gradually bleed in around next, hanging in the corners of his vision. His head is spinning. He is… confused as fuck.
Nothing new there.
Over the last month of his miserable life, V has woken up in many strange places, in various sorry states. The gentle mornings where he awakens in his own bed, or anywhere else nice, have become so few and far between that they’re now the exception to the rule. Small miraculous moments of wonder that need to be cherished.
This time though, this one might be one of the top tier gonk-ass ways to wake up in.
The problem is not about being in pain. It’s not a case where he comes to on some dirty floor or in a back alley, passed out in a puddle of his own blood and vomit.
There’s not even a single shit going on that’s truly wrong. Everything, now that the blurriness coalesced into real recognisable things, is perfectly okay. It looks like he woke up on some large terrace. It’s clean, but not too clean. There's a thin accumulation of dust in the corners. Three empty plastic jug filled with what looks like rain water sit against a wall. It’s quiet, bright and somewhat windy. The breeze smells weird. Almost briny, like Pacifica but also different.
The other main difference is there’s no discarded trash. No litter, no mess, no loud obnoxious ads, no blaring car horns, not even questionable stains or bodily fluids anywhere in sight.
None of the ever present filth of Night City.
He’s not in Night City.
He’s also not waking up to a sterile white space with a brain splitting headache, thousands of miles away from home, with all his senses and synapses firing all at once. He’s not in a lab stranded on his own, without a single sympathetic face in sight, and left to stumble and fall to his knees while a bunch of white coats just stare and take notes.
Fuck, he hated that space station, but he’s not in space anymore. He’s never going back to space.
He’s just fucking plain confused and alone.
There’s no hallucinations. There’s no Johnny. (Even though that part doesn’t come as much of a reassurance at all.)
“This is what you get for whoring yourself out to corps, you rotten piece of shit.” says a part of his brain that should be, is, dead.
So, there’s nothing to blame the confusion and the deep feeling of dislocation on other that it being too nice for Night City.
His eyes finally adapt to the bright light and it's just the sun in a clear blue sky. Mostly clear sky, actually. There’s actually a few stringy white clouds in there too, like a few forgotten cobwebs hanging around in the corners of the ceiling.
He can also see other shit where the blurred silhouettes used to be. They’re trees. Maybe real trees. Delicate bunches of swaying branches, full of spindly red leaves and there’s other kinds too. Large swaths of green further behind.
It makes him think of the gonk ass meditation videos from the zen monk guy. The one who kept pulling disappearing acts on him.
This time around as well, nothing else happens after. The leaves just keep swaying in a gentle breeze.
So, he gets up or, at least, he tries to. His limbs feel fucking uncoordinated as he tries to get his legs underneath him. He doesn’t even make it to standing fully up. He just sways a bit and falls back forward, bracing himself just before face planting on the concrete floor.
He waits for his optics to start acting out, for the headache and the nosebleed and the nausea and the whole shebang to kick in, but none of that happens.
Instead, he realizes as he just stays there, still on all fours, the red tree is fucking massive. The leaves of the Japanese maple are almost as big as his face and he’d have trouble putting his arms around the trunk. He didn’t know that shit could get as big as that.
The whole terrace is huge.
The fucked up BD bullshit is definitely still a viable theory then- or Mikoshi’s archive is really one fucked up luxury prison. That, he really doesn’t want to think about that right now.
In fact, aside from name of the program itself, his whole mind just draws a blank around it.
Looking around a bit more just reveals a long, large concrete surface with a second, different tree, a few smaller bushes, and not much else. All of the stuff is potted in enormous planters. It’s all fenced off, or fenced in rather, along with him. Flanked on three sides by large glass panels and metal railings. Beyond the glass, a city sprawls out. It’s not the skyline of Night City.
Still definitely not Night City.
The feeling of wrongness and confusion just gets worse as he tries to walk, or crawl, around, until he stops in front of a different kind of glass panel. This one’s even larger, like a giant hangar door. Whatever’s on the other side is dark, so it’s almost like a mirror.
And, as he sees the reflection, he flips out.
He screams, jumps back, scrambles, and almost falls on his face again.
All he can see is the reflection of a fucking cat staring back at him. A giant fucking cat?!?
It’s not Nibbles, fuck. The cat’s a different breed. It’s full of hair, long ass hair, and has a tiny face and enormous blue eyes.
He keeps screaming and it screams right back at him, yowling at the top of its lungs, body as taut as it can get, back bowed and tail rigid.
It mimics and mirrors him and it doesn’t make any fucking sense, so he looks down at his own body and all he can fucking see is fur. He runs, hits his head.
In true typical V fashion, he passes the fuck out.
He wakes up again.
The sun’s lower, almost setting, and he’s still a fucking cat, but this time around he grasps the little things a bit better. There’s thin lines in the corner of his vision, like frames tearing in a video. Like a camera feed that’s buffering or lagging, and there are other tells that it’s a remote drone HUD.
It’s like he’s jacked into droid, a god damn cat droid, and he didn’t even know the things fucking existed, let alone why he’s piloting a cat on the terrace of an unknown foreign city.
He should be stagnating in Mikoshi’s databanks, shelved like the worthless ‘rotten piece of shit’ he certainly is to Arasaka, because he’d signed the fucking contract Goro presented him with. He should be shelved until his engram either got deleted to clear out storage space for more important people or, and there he’d really be surprised, uploaded into some poor unfortunate 'compatible' meat bag.
He’d signed the damn contract out of spite. He’d wanted to cry back then, genuinely just cry, as he read the terms. For this first time since Jackie died, V had just wanted to curl up in a corner and bawl his fucking eyes out. Then, he'd wanted to scream and rampage, or throw himself at Goro and punch his fucking lights out (even if he probably never stand a chance against him). Fuck, even Goro had looked and sounded so, so grim. Defeated. (Unless that was V projecting onto him, but he’s really not so sure.)
When Goro had walked in that fancy new suit and said Hanako had forgotten all about V, that had been the real death sentence. V had wanted to laugh as well, just a little bit, because that was a fucking bullshit move and he’s pretty sure they both knew it. It was complete shit because he knew even fucking zombie Saburo could really forget about the kind massive of fuck up V (and Johnny) got wrapped in.
They gave him a contract to push him out of the way, to take him out of the equation. They wanted to remove any trace of his and Johnny’s story from of the precarious legislation battle that was going take place over those damn engrams and the whole coming back from the dead bullshit. There's one thing his old counter-intel career taught V really well. It was to predict when Big Shit was about to hit the Politics fan, and for that kind of bullshit, he'd always had stellar intuition.
They would shove under the rug the fact that those fucking chips didn’t fucking require any ‘willingness’ or agreement before irreversibly overwriting fully-formed human minds. No one would know that both him and that dick Yorinobu were fucking sentenced to death without ever agreeing to it, or even getting the courtesy of being told that they would get shredded out of their own bodies.
And, V had signed. He’d agreed to become an optimized parasite made out of pure data. Something plainly inhuman, something that’s no one, certainly not anyone’s soul, with no human rights.
He’d agreed out of spite, around eighty percent of it, give or take, but there was also a little twenty in there that was pure fucking sentiment. Because, no matter how much he fucking hated those Arasaka fuckers and that space station, he still couldn’t help but believe that Goro genuinely wanted to do him right. It was Goro who was holding the fucking contract, asking him to believe that it’d be some kind of solution. That they would go out and eat something together in Kagawa in the not-so-distant future.
The guy was trying, and genuinely hoping that they’d both come out on the other end of that nightmare alive. In some form of the definition.
Hope. Hope was a fucking bitch.
Hell, V was a fucking bitch. (He always was and will always be for the people he genuinely likes.)
Thus, since he was doomed to die anyway, he decided that he wanted to give Goro something to keep hoping for.
He also wanted to see what the ever fucking fuck Mikoshi, or the 'god’ or, ‘soul’ program really was. From the inside. See what it was that they put Johnny and Alt through. See what made Saburo Fucking Arasaka get to murder his own son and walk around in his corpse to say trite horrifying bullshit on TV.
Goro was too fucking good for that cesspit of a fucked up family anyways and, V…well. Over the brief, tragically short length of his life, V, Heywood kid, ex-Arasaka employee of the fucking month, honorary Aldecaldos member and official Sentimental Bitch, has come to realize he might also be one of the best Netrunners in all of Night City.
So, the truth is, maybe he also wanted to see if he could stir just a tiny bit more shit on the way out too. A small parting gift. Something to honor Johnny's legacy.
Now, the only bit he is still currently, painfully, missing is this: how the fuck did he get uploaded into a fake cat, in the middle of who the fuck knows where, on a secure network connection.
Gonkest fucking way to wake up in his entire fucked up life, hands down.