PART I // 2.0 // an ode to lost jigsaw pieces

[ Injured. That’s one way to describe him, sure. From the neocortex down he’s completely fine – a well-built young man studded with glittering patches of cyberware, scarred in places and covered in broad swathes of tattoos in other places, but otherwise whole and hearty in his airy medical dress. But his brain feels... shot. Pulled thin, overstretched, wounded. Injured, yeah, somewhere deep in the meat of his brain. The lights are too bright, the sharp edges of the room are fuzzy, distant – the light tastes metallic, the air smells blue. And his mind... his mind is missing something huge. Important.

Panic flares and lodges itself in his throat, choking him; he coughs, plasters his hands over his face, takes a heaving breath and fights the urge to pass out again. He’s painfully alone, scooped clean and raw, bleached to the bones. It’s wrong. It’s so fucking wrong.

Dragging his palms down his face, scraping over his metal jaw, he groans – a guttural noise of mourning for something he can’t even fully name. (No, no, no - the name is Johnny.) V glances aside, his pale blue optical processors whirring in his skull (fuck, why can he HEAR that--). There are pills on his table, neatly labelled in their uniform bottles. No orange. No blue. It hurts his head to try and read them, so he promptly forgets them. This isn’t something that’s going to be healed with pills. It never was. He drags together every ounce of strength in him and struggles upright, sitting haphazardly on the side of the bed. ]

’M checkin’ out, [ he mumbles thickly to whoever is nearby – fellow patients, visitors, whoever. The irony of his words are completely and utterly lost on him.

The ability to stand upright is completely lost on him, too. He staggers upright, a valiant effort, but his wounded brain thinks otherwise. The room spins and he pitches sideways, hands thrown out to grab whatever he can – the bed, the bedside table, the neat tray of pills – on his way to the floor, grunting: ]

Oh, fuck...

PART II // 5.0 // pennyroyal tea

So, Viveca’s said their bit and V’s installed the piece in his ear. It’s helpful, sure, and V has kinda missed the automated babble of messages rattling through his brains. It’s a small balm for the much louder, much ruder voice that he’s missing, sure... but it’s something. It fills the empty, accusing space between thoughts that feel much slower, much thicker than they used to. Fragmented. Distant.

Now reunited with his street clothes, V numbly wanders the halls. He’d made his pact, he was here to do a job and change the past – so why were they not getting straight down to business?

Because right now you've got scop for brains, he tells himself in lieu of the guy who would. Because you’re a dead man walking, you dumb fuckin’ gonk. Because you need time—

Time to heal, time to relax, yeah, he knows. And he fucking hates it - he doesn't deserve either thing right now. It takes a supreme effort from V to let himself do either, let alone both. So he explores instead of sitting down and making friends with the rest of the imported souls. The lab draws his attention first – there’s a fuckton of chrome installed in his body that could do with a check over, just to make sure that Arasaka doc hadn’t left any weird surprises floating around in his software.

So here’s V, stood before a lab computer, with his link in one hand staring intently at the computer’s interface as he scans the digital streams that swim through the lab, searching, pinging... ]

Hey, [ He says to anyone in the room. ] I'm lookin' for a port. [ He waggles his personal link, attached by its chrome umbilical to the heel of his palm. ] D’you know where we jack in to these things?