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Coming out of a deep dive never ceased to be the most jarring thing in the fucking world.
The net is dark, disturbing in its serenity. The world's only shape is formed from neon pinpricks like the stars of forgotten constellations in a wasted galaxy, and your shape was kaleidoscopic as you bled into the contours of every lock and keyhole. Truly losing yourself in its depths felt a lot like dreaming, and it wasn't the kind of dream you ever got to rouse from quietly. The disconnect happens in a blink of an eye, and before you know it everything's so goddamn bright and loud, like your own senses are reaching out to throttle your brain. Eight times out of ten you'll immediately have some gonk breathing down your neck about 'how did things go in there? What about their ICE? Were you caught? Did you leave a trace?' as if they really knew anything about what it was they were talking about; and all the while you're sitting there dealing with the worst fever of your life duking it out in your skull with the realization that yes, you are in fact still shivering your tits off in a bath full of ice.
Spend long enough diving in the net, and coming back to your body at all just feels wrong. Abberant; like all that meat and chrome and synthskin belonged to some other stiff, not you. You were possibility made static, rendered into a fixed shape, poured into your mold and shackled back to the bones of the world.
As much as anyone could ever be used to something like that, though, Kiwi was by now. She was a damn good runner, and she took pride in her work. She had every part of the dive polished to a mirror sheen, elevated to a work of art from start to finish by now. The tats and the bodymods and the chrome were just part of her signature.
The only flourish she really allowed herself anymore, really. She was good at her job, but that was all it was to her these days. She'd learned better than to dream bigger a long time ago. Let the braincases that fancied themselves rockstars get a hole burned through their central nervous system when they piss off the wrong corp, or their choombos turn traitor. If you were stupid, it'd happen to you sooner or later.
She'd been stupid, once.
Kiwi squinted into the California sunset streaming relentlessly through her window in bleary streaks of pink and orange, her pale, pruny-ass fingers still trembling from the cold as she fumbled for the long black cable running from the base of her skull. It was starting to cramp her neck, and at the very least she wanted to banish the stupid pop-up hovering in the corner of her eye reminding her she was safe to disconnect. A little tugging, a brief jiggle and one last yank, and— got it. There was a light kachunk as the cable dropped to the floor, and its parting gift was a jolt sent tingling through her nerves that made her eyebrow twitch.
Fuck, she could use a cig.
No gonks to bother her today at least, as she pulled herself upright, a few stray ice cubes sliding off her tits and back into the tub that sat haphazardly in the living room of the Heywood apartment she'd been squatting in for the past few months or so. Didn't much matter to her where the damn thing was set up. So long as her connection was stable and she could hook up to her hardware, that was that. She hadn't even bothered to clean the litter from the floor after moving in.
It was becoming harder and harder to really care about what the hell her surroundings were in meatspace, spending so long floating in and out of dives. It wasn't like she spent much time at home otherwise if she could help it. She was out at gigs, or in the Afterlife, or in someone else's bed. All she needed from this dump was her decking rig, her panoramic views, running water, the bodega across the street for beers, soy paste, cigs, and sacks of ice; and very rarely the shitty mattress shoved in the corner over in the other room.
Not that she'd always preferred the solitude, anyways. Not even as she was now, fresh out of the deep net and naked as the day she was born and shivering like a chihuahua out in the badlands at night. (As a matter of fact, she'd put a lot of work into chroming up her body in all the right ways. She wasn't about to shove looks this good into a netrunner suit to look like she was on baby's first scuba dive while people watched her eyes roll around in their sockets. Those blue nips had been eddies, and she wanted a return on that investment.)
She used to (emphasis: used to) to do all her dives back at HQ, around the ragtag bunch of edgerunners she'd once called family, but...
Kiwi found her hand idly tracing the seam where her mouthpiece met her skin, just at the top of her throat.
Even now, sometimes when coming up from the net, she still half-expected to feel Maine's fucking fist shattering what little was left of her jawbone like glass.
That was when the last dregs of the magic of it all died for her, looking back. Everything that followed after that, well... family became coworkers. Business was just fucking business.
And Night City business, well. She hated it enough to make her jaw ache.
Maybe that was part of the reason she'd had it swapped out for chrome a few years back. She did get fucking tired of her dentist always lecturing her about grinding her teeth. That and she really started to hate seeing her old jawline in the mirror.
She furrowed her brows because scowling was beyond her, and glanced down, catching sight of her body refracted back from the ice water.
Fuck, had she lost a lot of weight over the years, hadn't she? Probably was the diet of soy paste and triple-filtered cigarettes. She told herself she didn't need to take care of herself more than what was needed to work, not really. That was what she had decked out her skin for, back when she was still dumb enough to think that she was going to be a bigshot. From a nobody to the hottest bitch on the 'running circuit overnight. New tits and a new cunt and a new jaw and tattoos to tie it all together. So what if her implants looked a bit odd sitting on her skeletal ribs these days?
Like everything else in her life, it was hard to give a shit about the particulars so long as it all worked in the end.
A sigh came whistling through the holes of her pink chrome faceplate as she reached across the top of a beat-up desk to grab her little reward for a long day's work. A pack of Morley's and a beat-up steel lighter. Enough fucking self-reflection for one day. It was a telltale sign of losing your goddamn grip when you started to look back on your life's story. Before you know it, you start penning your own memoirs in your head.
Maybe she did need to go out tonight. Too many thoughts rattling around in her head for her tastes. A flick, a light, a cig shoved into one of her breathing holes, and sweet, sweet nicotine. It was only after that first exhale that she ever felt anything close to relaxed.
Oh, yes. She'd rather chrome up her lungs entirely than give this little ritual up. If she made it out of this next job, she'd have more than enough eddies to. That was Night City, really; either you caught a bullet or you got paid, and nine times out of ten it was the bullet. She hadn't met a single soul that could keep their shit together without something to take the edge off, and this was hers. The walls may be closing in all around her, but she wouldn't get crushed before she'd ash her cig. Maybe that alone was the reassuring part, although the nicotine sure did help.
Breathe in, breathe out. Find your anchor. Stay the course. City catches you cracking and it will shatter you like glass.
She squinted one red eye open as her temple began to buzz— one, twice, three times. Well, so much for smoking in silence. When she saw who it was on the caller ID though, she winced. Speak of the devil.
Kiwi knew what she wanted from Lucy, what Faraday wanted with Lucy, but what the hell could Lucy possibly want from her these days?
She patched in the call.
"Kiwi...?"
God, she sounded like a kicked puppy. More than usual.
"Whoaa, rare call. Butt-dial? Even possible on this?"
Something about it made her want to kick her more.
That wounded look in her eyes... she could practically see it, audio call or no. She'd looked like that since she first found her two years ago, and the cold lonely girl act was wearing thin. Poor little Lucy, beat down by the world, and all too content to let it.
"Hah... Yeah, it's been a minute, hasn't it?" Lucy played that barb off with grace. If Kiwi'd been an asshole, it was only in the way she usually was to everyone. Nothing to remark on, really.
"Some kind of emergency, or...?"
"...Nah, nothing serious. Just a question I needed to ask."
"A question?" Kiwi raised her eyebrow.
"Not like—" Lucy was backpedaling as if Kiwi had grilled her. She didn't think she should be calling. She didn't think she should be talking to her about this at all. "You know, no big deal... like how David's—"
"David?"
Of course it was about David. Girl had vanished into her own little dream with him for months. What surprised her was that she'd roused from it enough to be talking to her about it.
"Eh, he's fine for a punk." It was a non-answer, blown out as easily as the smoke from her lungs. "Thought he'd need hand-holding, help; but he stepped up big. Big leader... weird." She'd said it a bit more disingenuously than she meant to, but it wasn't more disingenuously than she felt. She could see the cracks. During the last job; blood on his face, a far-off look in his eye... they'd looked more like fissures to her. "And Faraday. We're back on his payroll."
If only Lucy knew how much.
"Yeah, I heard..." Lucy didn't sound too excited about that. Did she know something?
Kiwi pushed past the creeping paranoia. "Maine'd snap a circ if he saw David now."
Man sure did do a lot of snapping in his time, didn't he?
"Hmm...."
"He won't stop talking about you, though." Maybe it was for the best that Lucy couldn't see her roll her eyes at that. "He's moping, going on about when you're coming back. Wants you back ASAP." She sighs, and flicks an ice cube across the surface of the water. "Gets kind of old, getting reminded that you're the second -best 'runner the crew's got, you know?"
"That's..." Lucy trails off. Tact was a tricky needle to thread, and Lucy still cared to thread it. Cared enough about her to thread it, anyways. Made her sick.
"You taught me everything I know, Kiwi. Gang's in good hands with you watching the net."
It was bullshit, of course. And now, thanks to Faraday, Kiwi knew by how much. But she'd let it slide.
Appearances, appearances.
"Won't say you're wrong, but... have you thought about coming back? To shut him up, at least?"
"I... just need more time." Lucy's voice sighed in her inner ear. "There's just something I need to handle first. Just gotta do it, won't take long."
It seemed they were both playing with non-answers.
"Okaaaaaay. Fuckin' mysterious, even for you. Won't pry, though." She wouldn't because she knew. But that still didn't explain why she called, not completely.
"...Somethin' on your mind, Luce?"
More silence. Then, Lucy's voice again.
"...Hey. Are you busy tonight?"
Kiwi took a long drag from that Morley, the cherry casting a glow against her reflection in the water. Guess they were done pussyfooting around why Lucy called anymore, huh?
"Not if I don't want to be. Why?"
"Can I come over? I'll bring a six pack. We can talk."
Kiwi couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of it all. Just once, smoky and brief.
"We haven't just talked since you were the new kid off the streets, Lucy."
"It'll be like old times, then?"
Don't, Kiwi. Letting her in, seeing her face... it was just going to make doing what she had to that much harder. Plenty of easier ways to dodge the guilt, too. She could just go down to the Afterlife, suck down oblivion a few straws full at a time, and then fuck these second-thoughts away with a stranger.
It would have been so easy. Turning her down was what she should have done, but what she said was this:
"...My new place is a shithole, you know. Don't say I didn't warn you."
That got a genuine laugh out of Lucy, apparently. She didn't hear too many of those.
"It's Night City, Kiwi. The whole place is a shithole."
She couldn't argue with that.
"Lemme tell David I'll be out tonight, hop on the NCART. Be there in a couple hours?"
Kiwi closed her eyes, and exhaled the last lungful of smoke her cig had to offer her.
"...Sounds preem, sending the coords. See you in a few, Luce."
"See you in a few."
Kiwi crushed the tip of her cigarette between two fingers, and pulled herself up and out of the frigid tub. She grabbed a ratty yellow towel from the counter to drag across her spindly body, and just let it fall to the ground with the rest of the trash as she walked over to the window, the city she loathed spread bare before her. She let her forehead crash against the glass with a thunk.
Her red eyes just stared back at her from amidst the neon dusk.
Rabbits weren't supposed to walk straight into the fox's den. And Lucy seemed dead-set on showing her her throat.
She'd taught her better than this.
Kiwi had told her about a thousand times that thinking that way was gonna get her killed. As far as she was concerned, Lucy had her warnings. Whether they shared a beer or two beforehand was immaterial.
She reached for another cigarette.
She'd been waiting by the door for about twenty minutes or so, clad in nothing but a salmon-colored bathrobe, when the pop-up on her optics notified her that she had a visitor. (She should have gotten dressed, but she couldn't really ass herself to do that either. Probably would have been more disingenuous to roll out the red carpet for Lucy, anyways.) A quick cut to the camera feed, and there she was. Lucy, walking down the hall with her iridescent hair and her perfect figure and her sad eyes and all. Her red eyeshadow was immaculate as ever, but it couldn't hide how puffy those eyes were. She'd been crying.
Kiwi opened the frosted glass door that separated them in advance, and Lucy greeted her with a smile that looked obviously rehearsed.
"Hey, Kiwi..." Lucy raised up the contents of each hand, and gave them a shake. In the one, a six pack of shiny blue Abysos bottles. In the other, two packs: one of cigarettes, the other of plastic straws. Fuck, that was thoughtful. Kiwi didn't want her to be thoughtful. "...Did I catch you at a bad time?"
Kiwi followed her gaze, and looked down.
Okay, even she couldn't deny that, in this bathrobe, her build made her look like a wet cat. Too thin. Like a stiff breeze would knock her over.
She could've sworn she saw concern in those opal eyes of hers, and it pissed her the fuck off.
"...Time's as good as any. Come in."
She didn't wait for Lucy to follow before turning back to walk over to the living room.
They were both silent as the room around them, up until Kiwi'd hopped her bony ass up onto the top of the metal office desk shoved to the side of her decking tub. She patted the top of it twice, and Lucy hopped up in kind, placing the six pack between them. It was only after Kiwi had grabbed a bottle and popped it open with the bottle opener built into her palm that Lucy spoke up.
"...Are you doing alright?"
Oh, here we go.
"It's just... David's paying you, right? You said business has been good lately...."
Bitch couldn't figure out how to spit out what she wanted to say, but Kiwi could fill in the blanks. Any outside eye would probably see what Lucy was seeing; an emaciated cunt living alone in a derelict building. There were still newspapers and empty bottles strewn all across the floor, and she didn't even have so much as a chair to offer her.
She only saw the damage, not the stack of eddies she has squirreled away when it was finally time to cut her losses and ditch town. She had about two nights left in this dive anyways.
This was just a holding pattern. Let her think whatever the fuck she wants.
"He is. Business is good, just..." Kiwi drops one of the straws in her bottle, and feeds the other end through one of her grates for a sip. "...You know what it's like when you spend enough time in the net, yeah? Get a little numbed towards the particulars of meatspace. Got eddies, Luce. I'm just sitting on 'em 'til I find something worth spending them on."
"Yeah... Yeah, I guess you're right." Lucy cracked open her own bottle, and downed a long sip. She didn't look like she very much agreed with her assessment.
"...This visit isn't an intervention for me, is it?" Kiwi raised a blonde eyebrow.
"It could be. If you wanted it to be, yeah."
"Fuck no. Still got my head on straight, Luce. Unlike some people. Give me some credit, yeah?"
"...You're right. Sorry, if I assumed..." The smile she gave was sheepish, but it did seem reassured at the very least. "...it doesn't matter what I assumed or not. I trust you, Kiwi."
The words caught her like a dagger to the chest. She took another long sip of her beer.
"Always told you. Don't trust another soul in Night City." Her words were quiet, icy, flat. If they were a drink, David would have loved it. "Gonna get you killed one of these days."
Lucy just laughed as if it was a joke between old friends, and Kiwi couldn't tell her she was wrong.
"You haven't changed a bit, Kiwi. Even after all this time..." Lucy looked at her like one looked at an old photograph, or a favorite shirt you've outgrown. Riddled with nostalgia. "You're still the same woman I ran into on the NCART a couple of years back."
"And you're the same naive kid who tried to swipe my shards." She couldn't bear that look, so she didn't look at it. Didn't want to remember that girl in the brown hoodie. Just out the window and into the urban decay, as she drained more of her bottle. Synth hops always tasted like paint-thinner, but alcohol was alcohol, and it made the conversation easier to bear. "Guess we're both stuck."
"Yeah... guess we are, huh?"
They finished this beer in silence, and moved onto the next with little fanfare.
"...You've got a great view, though." She could feel Lucy swinging her feet where she sat. "Can practically see all of City Center from here."
Lucy just couldn't let a silence be tonight, huh? That... wasn't actually typical for the two of them. Kiwi had never been much for idle conversation, and neither it seems had been Lucy. They must've sat in a comfortable silence together a thousand times by now.
"This place isn't without charm, yeah?" Kiwi was starting to feel the buzz now, one and a half bottles deep. Never did have tolerance worth a shit, really; not with her build. Her head swam in a way that was almost pleasant. "...Think it used to be some start-up office before the original owners bailed out. Pretty much abandoned, but they left the power and the net hookups. Think all the bills for the place get routed to some desk probably halfway across the city, where an AI puts down the eddies without a second thought. Lucky me."
She tilted her head back as acid reflux tried to drag some of that beer back up her throat. It'd just be embarrassing if backwash came pouring through her mouth grates like she was a showerhead, and would somehow make this scene even more pathetic than it already was.
"When you describe it like that, it doesn't sound too bad." Lucy drummed her fingers on the neck of her bottle. "Should really pick up all the trash though. I can help, if you want—"
"I'll get around to it." Kiwi fixed her a look that shut her up good. "...Just drop it, okay?"
"Fine, fine..."
More silence. And even like this, Lucy was beautiful. Effortlessly, always. Even surrounded by junk furniture and garbage and her disheveled ass for company, Lucy floated through the world. It made her sick to see. Lucy the wunderkind, gorgeous and graceful and talented in one utterly effortless package. She could have set the town on fire like nobody else. Easier than Kiwi ever could. Kiwi had hoped her star would rise, once. Believed it couldn't do anything but.
When Kiwi looked at Lucy now, she mostly just saw all that wasted potential.
"...Luce." Kiwi leveled with her, looking at her straight. "Nice as it is to knock back a couple of beers and get lectured about my life choices... mind telling me what you're really doing here?" She raised raised an eyebrow. Lucy looked like she was caught off guard. "I'm flattered, but you and I both know I'm not your first choice of company anymore."
She watched Lucy open her mouth to object, but it looked like she didn't really have anything to say for herself. Kiwi had just said the unspoken part out loud.
"Shouldn't you be screwing your boyfriend in your swank ass apartment right now?"
There it was. In a moment, it looks like Lucy's eyes hollowed out as she stared out into that landscape of neon and heartbreak, chugging what was left of her bottle.
"...He doesn't even touch me anymore, Kiwi." Lucy set down her empty with a quiet clink that reverberated through the derelict apartment, and moved to crack open a new one. "Sometimes it doesn't feel like he even sees me these days."
Oh.
"Oh?" All Kiwi had to offer her— all she dared to offer her— was her gaze. She'd been right. She usually was right. She hated always being right. "Something happen? You two on the rocks, or...?"
"No. No, he just... It's like he's wasting away, Kiwi." The tremor in her voice was unmistakable. Lucy chugs at her third beer, pausing to wipe the tears from the corners of her eyes too. "Every night he just gets home, fucking turns on the TV, and stares off into space. Just that. All fucking night. I try asking what's wrong, what's hurting him, and he just smiles and nods and acts like everything's fine. Like he's fine. Waited until three in the goddamn morning for him to come to bed last night... just found him passed out on the couch the next day."
The words just come pouring out of her, one after another, like so much emotional vomit. Retching pain out from the bottom of her gut.
She must be desperate for a confessional if she picked her as her booth.
"Kiwi, you have to tell me... has he been like this at work, too? Is he okay?"
Or was it something wrong with her? That seemed to be the question Lucy couldn't bring herself to ask.
"...He's been fine. Mostly. But..." Kiwi couldn't hold out any longer, as she tore at the cellophane wrap around the pack of cigarettes with her fingernails. "...You're not gonna like what I have to say, Luce."
"Please..." Kiwi jolted as she felt Lucy's hand come down to grip at her own. Tears were rolling down Lucy's cheeks now, as their eyes met in the dark. "If you know something, just tell me...!"
Kiwi pulled her hand away sharply. Lucy gave her a wounded look, and Kiwi calmly used that free hand to finish lighting her smoke. She needed to be breathing something besides air if she was gonna have this conversation now. The smoke came out in a dozen wisps from the holes in her breathing mesh.
"...Seen the way he shakes when he thinks we're not looking. Seen him go off-kilter on more than one job." Kiwi looks askance, looking anywhere besides Lucy's devastation was better. "Think David's starting to take after Maine in more ways than one."
Lucy was a smart girl, at least in this respect. Kiwi trusted her to put two and two together.
And when she did... Lucy cried. The kind of loud, ugly tears that made her shoulders shake, made snot run down her chin. Tears like the world was ending.
Kiwi had seen a lot of Lucy these past two years, but she'd never seen her cry.
She was less prepared for Lucy to bury her face into her bathrobe, sending the empties sitting between clattering off the desk into the rest of the detritus.
Kiwi wanted to slap her, at the touch. Wanted to scream, wanted to disappear, wanted nothing to do with this pathetic woman with her ever bleeding heart. It didn't take a genius to see there was no coming back from where David was going, to see where he was leading them, to see which way the wind blew. Lucy was so damn smart, but in this she was always, always a fool. She loved the wrong people and she trusted the wrong friends and she never. Fucking. Listened. Years of warnings and advice just bounced off deaf ears.
And now here she was. Three beers in, seeking comfort in her Judas. It made her want to gag.
She didn't do anything she wanted to do. She couldn't. Couldn't let herself, couldn't bring herself to; it didn't matter. She just sat there as Lucy clung to her like the last life raft in a storm of her own making.
"I'm sorry, Kiwi..." Lucy croaked out, feebly, like a fried speaker. "Had to get out of the house tonight.... Just couldn't stand being alone in bed again with that fucking TV on...!" She could feel Lucy ball her hands into fists in the fabric of her robe. "Please…!"
"...Please, what?" Kiwi ashed her cigarette in her last empty bottle. "What do you want from me, Luce?"
When Lucy finally looked up at her, there was something truly desperate in those eyes. A wretched, pleading look as something, somewhere, dawned on her. And she wasn't letting go of her robe, either.
"...I don't want to be alone tonight, Kiwi."
Oh.
"Oh."
There were a lot of things Kiwi knew she should do right now.
She should turn Lucy down. She should just let her sleep this off on the mattress in the back room, so the two of them could go on to pretend like none of this ever happened. She should go back to wishing she'd never caught that thief on the NCART trying to make off with her shards and that she'd never met Maine at the Afterlife and that she hadn't been born in this stupid fucking town with all its stupid fucking rules that she was the only idiot to bother tattooing on her heart while everyone else fell to pieces around her.
She should throw Lucy through the goddamn window herself. It would have been kinder than what she does instead.
"I don't kiss." She shrugged her robe the rest of the way off of her shoulders, letting Lucy see the web she was dead-set on getting herself stuck in.
"I don't mind." Lucy answered, unhooking her collar at the back of her neck.
Her blood was already on Kiwi's hands. Compared to that, this sin was nothing.
"Good. Keep stripping."
Everything was in freefall already.
She watched Lucy slip her top down her pale shoulders, off perfect tits silhouetted by the city's glow and framed by the circuit lines running down her body, and she ashed her cigarette.
None of them were making it out of this alive. They were too stuck in their ways for it to ever be different.
Kiwi's hands were on her now, round curves traced with such angular tools. Peeling her out of synthfabrics. Sharp fingernails on Lucy's skin like a painting she wanted to mar. She'd made her once, and now she unmade her.
You grab what you can and you move on. You don't stay for the moment it all falls apart.
"Stand up."
You survive because nobody else cares to. You take what you need because they won't need it for long.
So Kiwi did exactly that.
Kiwi took Lucy's hand and guided her step around the cast-off bottles and crumpled newspapers. She pressed her back against the window and she took her in her arms with the city right behind them, bathing their bodies in uncaring neon. Lucy felt like a dream against her, so warm and soft and wanting. She felt like Kiwi had always thought she might.
Should she have done this sooner? She wondered to herself as she gripped Lucy's thigh, propping her bare foot up on a nearby box. They could have been something. This could have been anything besides desperation.
But then she'd be trapped right alongside her, wouldn't she? And she would have broken her only rule.
"Kiwi..." Lucy tasted her name as her arms came to rest around her neck, as she leaned her forehead against hers. Trapping Kiwi with nowhere to go but into those sad opal eyes.
Mascara dripped down her flushed red cheeks. Kiwi was never going to tell her how beautiful and wretched she looked right now. Two long fingers glid across Lucy's parted sex, already slick with arousal, and pressed into her heat.
Kiwi was rough. She was a bully with those fingers as she picked up the pace, her free hand pressing white crescents into her rear as she fingerfucked her, curling and pumping against her inner walls. The sound of Night City muffled through glass was almost louder than they were, the wet slaps of her palm against her cunt, Lucy's jagged breaths.
Lucy hooked her leg around Kiwi's, as she continued to come undone, panting in her ear. She could tell Lucy wanted to kiss her—wanted so badly to lose herself against a lover's lips, but there was nothing to be done for that by design. Besides, they both knew Kiwi's lips weren't the ones she was thinking of. With nowhere else to go, Lucy just buried her face in the crook of Kiwi's neck while she writhed, pressed flush between Kiwi and the cold pane of glass.
And with Lucy kissing her throat, Kiwi had to try and look past her reflection, those hateful reds peeking over Lucy's bare shoulder. She could almost lose herself in this, damnit. The walls were closing in around them, but it wouldn't crush them until Kiwi had her pound of flesh.
"Ahhn... Kiwi, I'm... F-fuck...!"
She felt Lucy spasm through that climax, felt her gush around her fingers... but all she could see were those red eyes staring back.
They fucked for hours. Like their lives depended on it, against every dilapidated surface in this shithole.
Like it was last call before the bar closed down.
They were in the back room now, Kiwi's fingers gripping into Lucy's scalp as she rode her face on top of the dingy mattress, eyes closed as she focused on how fucking good that tongue felt curling between her legs.
Her moans of pleasure came muffled by chrome, as she opened her eyes to half-lids and looked down the plane of her torso. Now, that was what she'd gotten the tattoo for. To look down and see the person she'd caught in her web. Now it was Lucy, eyes hazy, her own needy whines turned into so much vibration against Kiwi's clit as she fingered herself behind Kiwi's back. Ohhhh, yes. She was trapped in her web alright, and the metaphor had never been more apt. It had always been Lucy she'd trapped, ever since the day they met.
She dragged her into this life that ruined her, and now that it had she was sending her to a more unkind prison by far—
Stop. Stop thinking. All of that can wait; stop thinking about anything but this moment, right now, how close you are to cumming one more time.
She bucked her bony hips, faster and faster until she was practically scraping her cobalt pubes against Lucy's lip. Her grunts came rattling out of her mouthpiece as she tightened her grip.
"Fuck—"
Kiwi's lungs heaved as she slumped forward, all that tension in her body reaching the tipping point and spilling over the edge. Below her, she made even more of a mess of Lucy's face. The mattress had probably seen much worse in its time.
She dismounted Lucy's face on shaky legs, and dropped down onto the uneven box springs next to her as her breathing evened out in the aftershocks.
"That was...." Lucy couldn't find the words, just settling on an exhale instead while Kiwi lit another cigarette. It was the only light in the room, and it cast their quiet world in a deep orange glow. Lucy reached her hand out for a drag, and after Kiwi had had a nice deep one of her own, she passed it over.
"Yeah... It was."
Kiwi watched her suck in a lungful of smoke, coughing a bit as she let it pass from her lips.
"Ugh... why do you smoke these?" Lucy offered the words, and the cigarette, with a quiet smile. "Didn't use to."
"They're cheap and they’re chock full of nicotine. All I need anymore." Kiwi took her cig back, and looked it over before slotting it in one of her grates.
They didn't cuddle afterwards. They just kind of looked at each other for a while, there huddled naked in the dark. Words danced on their lips that they'd never, ever say.
Until, Kiwi did. Almost despite herself.
"Listen, Luce... You should really cut your losses. You know?"
One last lifeline. Lucy deserved that much from her. She'd take the heat with Faraday if she somehow actually took it.
"Huh?"
"Ditch David. Skip town. Start over somewhere else while you still have the chance. We both know this is gonna fuckin’ end badly. Don't tell me you don't see that."
Kiwi'd broken the spell between them. For a few short hours, the outside world had ceased to exist, and she'd invited it back in. But it stood to be said.
"...Can't give up on him. Not now." Lucy avoided her gaze. She looked to the door. "I know how it looks, Kiwi. I'm not...."
Not stupid? No. She couldn't decide if she's stupid or not anymore.
"...If there's even a chance I can get through to him, Kiwi. I gotta try."
"Yeah, yeah. And I thought we could get through to Maine, too."
Silence. Utter silence. The silence of the grave.
So they were decided.
"...I should go."
"Sure. Yeah, Luce."
Lucy pulled on her clothes in a hurry; the outfit they'd picked out together on a hot summer's day a lifetime ago. She was probably already rationalizing what had happened in her head, as she slipped into her one-piece, pulled on her shorts, her bolero. That she'd been drinking. That she'd just been so desperately lonely. That Kiwi had been a port in the storm of her life once.
But Lucy, when it came down to it, would stay by that man's side like her own pair of concrete shoes, and Kiwi had known that from the start. This was just cigarettes to Lucy. Something to take the edge off. And that suited Kiwi just fine. It should suit her just fine. She ignored the fact it didn't.
Lucy went for the door.
"...Hey, Luce?"
"...Yeah, Kiwi?"
Kiwi looked up at her one last time, like she was. Like she'd known her. The woman who floated through the world, through her own private heartbreak. A rising star turned comet, cresting towards the end of the arc of her descent. Lucy loved her self-destruction far too much, and she’d burn to save someone who was beyond saving already.
Perhaps that was what set them apart, here at the end of things. Even for the person she cared most about in this whole wretched world... Kiwi refused to burn.
"...Just watch your back, yeah?"
"Don't worry, Kiwi." Lucy lied. "I always do."
And then she was gone. Leaving Kiwi alone, same as it ever was. The last person around when all the music stopped.
She ground out her cigarette right there on the floor, and rolled over to get some sleep.