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aikuse · 5 months ago

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-> i really wanna stay at your house | 2,290 words. character x character, reincarnation au, smoking, angst, heavy canonical spoilers, implied character death, brief mentions of office life.

author’s notes: i have no words other than i cried a lot while writing this. this has been in my notes for almost a whole year! and is finally ready to grace the archive and the tumblr dash. i heavily recommend watching this show if you can. so much contained in only ten episodes…i can’t speak well of it enough.

-> archive of our own link (available to ao3 users only)

Man, she really needed a smoke.

Lucy races up to the rooftop, feet pattering against concrete as she opens the door to the outside. The cold air hits her skin with a slap, gooseflesh rising all over her as she pulls her coat closer around her with a shiver. There’s a thin sheet of snow drifting down from the cloudy sky, and the city around her is muffled by the slowly piling flakes.

She struts across the rooftop, ignoring the stacked chairs and choosing to go right to the end, sitting on top of one of the benches. Her legs lay off of the edge of the building, feet kicking in the open air as she pulls out her cigarettes. The flash of warmth from her lighter combined with the menthol hitting the back of her throat has her sighing, leaning back on her palms and looking up at the sky.

She thinks of a different time, of a different rooftop in a different era. So much has changed since then; even she doesn’t always remember what happened to everyone, including herself. She recalls in flashes; seeing a different bathtub than she lounges in nowadays, something heavy attached to the back of her head. Code breaks through her vision sometimes, numbers and letters and jargon that she doesn’t understand, the knowledge long-lost. It’s all in red too, always in red.

She hates the color red.

She takes another pull, the nicotine flooding her lungs and giving her more relief with every passing moment. The moon is above her; she doesn’t look up at it. There’s something about it that scares her, because if she does, she might remember something. It’s this horrible aching feeling in her chest, of knowing she’s lost something but doesn’t know exactly what.

It must have been special if I feel like this.

She swings her legs again from where she sits. The building is so tall…twenty stories above the light rail that’s zipping across the city in a silent venture, the snow muffling its noise. Tokyo is pretty at this time of night, lights blinking so far beneath her, the vantage point making her look closer to the moon than the earth upon which she sits.

There’s crunches behind her, of someone’s boots landing in the freshly laden snow. Lucy turns her head, expecting one of the normal tenants to be joining her. There’s a few people she recognizes from the office, along with some older folks who need to find relief in their coveted cigars they’ll tell stories about sourcing from.

It’s neither.

It’s…

It’s him.

So much happens in the span of time it takes the man to approach her and move next to her. Lucy’s brain feels like it’s on fire, her chest tight as she grips her cigarette like a lifeline. Flashes of her old life flicker across her vision, the man’s shape changing into one much shorter, much younger, with a neon-yellow jacket that’s too large for him and a smile that shows too many teeth. His hands are in his pockets, stuffed deeply inside just like he used to.

Brighter eyes, too. Not dull like they are now.

She does her best to contain her sudden panic, quickly looking away from him and anywhere but him as he reaches into his jacket pocket. He rifles through his jacket for something, a grin stretching across his face as he finds his own lighter and pack of cigarettes. The sticks in question are all white with a black filter; there’s a gold wrapping connecting the halves together. It looks like it would taste strange; smokier, more masculine in its own way.

But Lucy can’t even focus on the cigarettes themselves.

She can’t focus on anything else.

She simply watches him, in horror as David brings the stick to his lips, five o’clock shadow covering his chin.

He smokes now.

His hands rest against the balcony’s edge as he looks over the city skyline. The lights, although dimmed by the snow, are so bright against his brown eyes. Full of life despite his inability to care for his facial hair. Her chest feels so tight, tighter than ever as she finishes off her own cigarette, hopping down—

“Hey.”

She stops immediately, turning around and looking at him square in the face. This version of him is tall, not as bulky as he used to be thanks to the implants that threatened to break his bones. However, this time, his frame isn’t sharp; it’s smooth, structured, so much less in pain. Here, his skin is smooth, untainted barring a few tattoos curling across his skin, poking above the neckline of his sweater and extending down across the tops of his hands.

Although, she doesn’t miss the glint in his eyes that she remembers falling in love with an eon ago.

He’s the same.

But different.

He doesn’t say anything more, so she manages to get out a “hi” before she’s attempting to turn away from him. He’s so close to her, when did he get that close to her? She jumps as his hand wraps around her arm, and there’s something in his eyes that’s shifted. There’s something knowing there, and she’s praying that he’s not having flashbacks like she did. Like she’s having right now, seeing blood dripping down the side of his face, eyes crazed, mouth ajar while he yells for his mother, seeing someone who isn’t there—

“Do I know you from somewhere?”

She doesn’t look at him. She can’t. It’s written on her face, she can feel the downturning of her lips and the tears pricking at her eyes. Instead, she looks up at the moon. So big, so bright, so far away. The moon doesn’t need to worry about taxes, or rent, or getting a job, or any of the bullshit that adult life has brought her.

It simply appears at night, like clockwork, without fail; basking the world in shades of silver and white.

“What do you mean?” she answers. She plays coy.

Does he know what gravity that sentence holds?

He scoffs, releasing her arm. “Never mind. Forget I said anything.”

Another chance to come together and recall forgotten. Lucy tells herself it’s better that way. It’s better to forget, to move on, to not rehash the past. What’s it going to do? Remind her of everything that happened that she’d soon pull out of her own brain like a growing weed?

David’s funny in the office.

She quickly discovers that they’ve been working for the same company for months; they’ve just never needed to cross paths, because why would they have? Apparently he’d just gotten promoted onto her floor, working under Maine. It’s ironic, really, thinking about how she seems to remember her fellow employees but none seem to remember her. She’s not sure if that’s fully the truth, though. She’s seen the way Maine’s eyes glaze over sometimes. Like he’s recalling something painful when he looks at her.

David, despite his organizational tact (which is something he did not have before), is clearly not built for office life. It’s written all over his face as he sits in his cubicle, munching on the sandwich he’d made himself.

Here, his only worries are Rebecca stealing the stapler off of his desk without asking. It’s the coffee machine running out of his favorite instant coffee cups. It’s the printer smelling his fear and failing to work when he’s rushing to an executive meeting. It’s so mundane that Lucy can’t help but laugh about it.

It’s so, so far from the life they’d lived before. The hard life he had lived before; she’d made peace with her own, but God, she doesn’t miss watching him spiral in front of her. Knowing that it was her fault, introducing him to this life so soon after his mother died right in front of him. It was her responsibility to shoulder that pain.

Her cross to bear, funnily enough.

There’s glances he gives her every once in a while, though. The old David appears in those moments, however fleeting. Her photographic memory holds them in time like a Polaroid, slipping them into an album that’s shoved into the back of her brain. A place she only goes when she’s at her limits, both mentally and physically.

He comes by her office often, leaning on the glass with his arms crossed in front of him. The office shirts he wears have ridiculously loud prints on them; all yellow and blue, just like his old jacket. She swears when he turns and walks away, she can envision the symbol on the back of his jacket sometimes.

She rubbed her eyes for a while after that to remove the picture from her brain, and went back to working, nails tapping against the keys to distract her from the feeling welling up in her chest.

Regret.

It’s at six months that she finally lets go.

They’re up on the rooftop, smoking together, a bottle of shitty wine shared between the two of them. It’s almost empty, and Lucy’s vision is hazy as she looks over at David.

He’s in a tank top this time, his muscles curving nicely underneath the light fabric. Tokyo’s going through a heat wave right now, and the thin sheen of sweat on his skin glints in the moonlight, silver specks across his form as he looks over at her. There’s a faint redness on his cheeks from the wine as he sloppily grins.

“What are you thinking about?”

His voice is so much smoother than she remembers. Deeper, too, almost raspy. Then again, it’s not like he made it past nineteen the last time she saw him. She shakes her head, smiling at him gently as she takes another rip off her menthol.

“Nothing important.”

He chuckles. It’s dark.

“You always seem so lost in your own head. Must have a lot going on, huh?”

Oh, that’s close. That’s too close to the truth, really. “Sort of,” she chooses to respond, attempting to keep the cryptic air around her tight, like a cloak. Like a safety net. She looks up at the moon as she does so, tilting her head, and—

“Oh.”

Something shifts in the air, so quickly that Lucy herself can’t stop it, couldn’t bear to as she feels him reach out to her. His hand lands on her shoulder, but it feels a mile away as she begins to shake, tears threatening to finally drift down her cheeks as she bites her lip.

She can’t stop it anymore. She can’t hold back the memories.

“I never forgot how happy you looked when we were up there, you know.”

She nods to the moon’s face as she does so, and risks a look at David.

She’s expecting anything but what she finds; she’s anticipating fear, horror, confusion, even resentment to come flooding across his face. But instead, she discovers quite the opposite.

Relief.

He sighs, thumb drifting across the soft skin of her shoulder as he scoots closer. He moves his hand up to her chin, forcing her to look at him as she jumps, feeling the electricity between the two of them. She can’t stop the tears; they’re already falling as he just looks at her. He doesn’t say anything, and it’s eating at her.

What the fuck.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

It comes out as a croak, and he chuckles again, fingers gently brushing circles onto her chin.

“So you do remember.”

If the world had ended right then and there, Lucy would have been happy. She would have been satisfied, with knowing David did remember, but also tearing her heart out of her chest in the fearful understanding that he remembered. What did he remember? Did he remember his death? The way he’d looked at her before he went to face off against Adam Smasher? The way he’d blundered into every situation he’d gotten into and leaned on a toxic body modification to help him avenge his mother?

“All of it.”

“W-What?”

“All of it.” He repeats himself. “You asked me what I remembered, and I remember all of it.”

His face is blurry. The tears are flooding down her cheeks now as Lucy chokes out a sob, because she can’t sit next to him anymore. Instead, she leans into him, ready to crawl to him. Because he’s back with her, he’s here, undamaged, unscathed, big shoulders and cocky grin and raucous laughter and everything that made him David.

Everything she had missed. It felt like a piece of her chest, the aching part she could never fully understand, was filled.

“I missed you,” she manages to say against the thin fabric of his tank top. His fingers are larger, carding through her hair, nails able to dig into her scalp as he coos at her.

“I missed you too. So fucking much. More than I will ever understand.”

They sit like that for a long time, Lucy sobbing into his shirt, and David resting his chin on her head. The sobs quiet into hiccups and sighs, and then she finally arises, looking up at him with stars in her eyes. “It’s too bad,” she says, out of context, and he raises an eyebrow.

“Too bad for what?”

She points to the moon, the fullness shining down on them. Was it brighter than before? Did it feel brighter now that it’s watching it’s two halves find each other again?

“We’ll never be able to go back there, you know. Not here, at least.”

His eyes glimmer as he responds, her body light in his hands.

“Why would I want to? I got my moon right here in front of me.”

divider credit: @/cafekitsune networks: @interstellar-inn @themovingcastlez

disclaimer: DO NOT copy or repost my works for any reason. translations are acceptable, but please ask for permission first!

#cyberpunk edgerunners #david martinez x lucy kushinada #david x lucy #david martinez x lucy #ari's autographs #hic sniff sob. i'll never be over these two idiots. ever. just in case u were wondering <3

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