#she normally would believe these things but she wouldn't necessarily feel those associated emotions

[corpocyborg]

WIP - Excerpt from "Secure Your Soul" (AU where Corpo V never leaves Arasaka)

From Chapter TBD - "Feed the Demon"

V wasn't sure how much time had passed, but as she started to regain lucidity, she became gradually aware of Johnny's voice in her head.

"I mean, for fuck's sake, V," Johnny was saying. "I've seen your memories. The things you've done for 'Saka. You've killed. Blackmailed. Ruined lives. And for what? Corporate rep? Profit margins? How do you live with yourself?"

V stopped dead in her tracks. She couldn't remember how she'd gotten here. The alley she was in was abandoned. Litter lined the sidewalk, and the street lamps were barely flickering. In a dark corner nearby, a stray dog was busy devouring a rat.

For a few seconds, V just watched it. Homeless dogs were a rare sight in Night City. This one was dark gray and half its left ear was missing. It looked lean and muscular, and it tore off chunks of its prize with a ferocity that domestic dogs almost never displayed.

"You see that?" She asked Johnny.

Johnny's physical image materialized in the alley. He leaned against the wall - appeared to lean, she reminded herself - and gazed at the dog. "See everything you see," he replied.

"You're looking. You're not seeing."

"That so? And what'm I supposed to be seeing?"

"The evolutionarily synchronized relationship between predator and prey."

Johnny looked up from the dog and stared at her. She could see the anger on his face, but she could also feel him manifesting that same anger inside her body. No matter. She'd make it hers. Anger was an emotion she could work with.

"You see one dog eating one rat," V continued, allowing some of Johnny's anger to seep into her voice, directing it back at him. "In your interpretation, there's one winner and one loser. It's accurate, in a way. The dog wins. Look at him. He's a survivor. Even you should be able to recognize that."

Johnny didn't answer. His image was looking away from her, eyes locked on the warring animals. But she could still feel him fuming. Only now it was hard to tell where his anger ended and hers began. She continued speaking.

"You don't see the bigger picture. For every dog having dinner tonight, dozens starve. For every rat providing the main meal, dozens get away. They're fast enough or clever enough to escape.

"Only the best dogs feed, only the best rats live. And because of this, over generations, both species improve. In the end, the prey species benefits just as much as the predator species does. And the world gets better."

"The world." Johnny repeated the phrase slowly. She tasted his revulsion on her tongue. "This world?" he asked. He gestured at the trash-strewn alleyway. The dog had finished its meal and had settled to sleep in a blanket likely left there before by a homeless person. "This is your brave new world?"

"No, Johnny," she responded, her voice echoing the revulsion he'd forced her to feel. "These are just the rats that got caught."

[writedisaster]

was thinking dumb meme thoughts, and somehow that led to me writing an entire post about how my variously scarred characters would react to someone kissing their scars? Okay.

under the cut because this ended up being a weird mix of horny stuff and discussions of trauma

The Marquis de Carabas: Most of the Marquis's scars come from that one time he was tortured to death. If anyone tries to pay special attention to them, he will extricate himself from the situation with the grace of a cat evading a toddler's embrace. There have, in the fullness of his life, been one or two people who were exceptions to this. He will never reveal their names, but it's safe to assume that you're not one of them.

Jim: doesn't really have any strong feelings associated with her scars, which hail from mundane, non-life-threatening physical accidents. As such, she wouldn't really have super strong feelings about anyone kissing them. It would seem cute and soft to her, and would probably get her in a gooey romantic mood, but it's definitely not the only (or even most impactful) way to get Jim in a gooey romantic mood.

Bête: If you have no power over Bête and you attempt to kiss xir scars - or even to touch xir scars, or even to push back Bête's clothing to expose xir scars - you're getting backhanded. If you do have power over Bête... I mean, I don't really want to use this space to dwell on Bête's experiences when people with power over xem cross xir boundaries. But a note to those who believe they can treat Bête however they please with no repercussions: sure, quite possibly. But it would be best to spend the rest of your life being very, very careful that those repercussions never get a chance to find you.

Pliers: If you've gotten close enough to Pliers Mahoney to consider kissing her scars, it's because she wants you to. She's proud of her battle scars; a partner taking the time to linger on them would be a fun part of body worship for Pliers. It feels like a recognition of her strength and prowess in a similar way to boot worship (which, yes, she's also into) but with the more conventional intimacy of skin-on-skin.

Lip, mainverse: Well, in all honesty, it's hard to find a spot to kiss on mainverse!Lip's body that isn't marked by a scar, so for this paragraph, "kissing Lip's scars" will be understood as a kiss that pays obvious attention to the contours and texture of scarring, not just a kiss that happens to take place over a scar or two. Anyways, if someone's approaching Lip's scars with that kind of deliberate focus, Lip is going to assume it's a sex thing for that person. Which is completely fine by them! Well, kind of. Lip does deliberately lean into the sexualization and fetishization of their scars, but like a lot of other things Lip leans into, it's not necessarily wholly healthy for them. They may enjoy scar worship in the moment, but after it's done, it would be really good for Lip to get aftercare focusing on them having worth outside of the availability of their body and blood. But Lip is bad at recognizing their own emotional needs, and has accepted the post-sex mood crash as a normal part of their experience, so unfortunately, I don't think they'd be able to actually ask for that specific aftercare.

Lip, VtM verse: VtM!Lip only has one set of scars- the set from the initial attack. So they feel very differently about those scars than the self-chosen smokescreen of their mainverse scars. But people do still sexualize and fetishize those scars, and Lip... I don't know if it would be right to say they lean into it, because I don't think they feel like they have a ton of choice in it? But they are very much aware that those scars are kind of their trademark, and they work with what they've got. So they don't reject attention to the scars. But anyone kissing those scars is likely to make Lip dissociate. (Which is partly due to the initial trauma of the attack, and partly due to an early partner of theirs who noticed they had strong reactions to the scars being touched and basically used those reactions as a way to control Lip.) The severity of the dissociation varies, as does what it looks like from the outside. Occasionally, Lip will present with the classic thousand yard stare, but it's much more likely that they'll continue to be vague and bubbly and flirtatious, just... without anything behind the eyes. People who know Lip and/or care enough to pay attention to their responses will almost definitely notice that Lip isn't all there, but people who are unfamiliar and/or distracted by their own desires tend to take the facade at face value. The fact that Lip's instinct is to feign okayness and even arousal in situations where they feel unsafe has meant that sometimes, they stay in those unsafe situations longer than they need to. But at other times, it's kept those situations from escalating into something worse.