Author's note: Finally back to this baby! Sorry, I had to focus for a bit on my DxD fic, then I got sick. But I'm feeling an itch to give this crossover some life! Even wrote a lot more than usual today. Hope you guys enjoy this! Will probably focus on this for a bit, at least until it has form so that people see if they like it or not.
Also, canonically, Vista is really against Augmentations lmao. Poor her.
The Shards of Freedom.
Chapter 3: A Cold Rebirth.
Missy Biron, Vista.
Night city, 2074
Cold. That was the first thing she noticed.
Not the winter chill of Brockton Bay. This was absolute, crawling through her veins, pressing on her chest, sinking into her very bones.
She almost laughed. A part of her really wanted to.
Guess this is hell, she thought dimly. Makes sense. I've done enough to deserve it.
Civilians saw heroes as paragons of justice, but Earth Bet stripped illusions fast. Vista had followed orders since she was a kid. She fought. She killed when there was no other choice.
A hero wasn't supposed to sink to those lengths, but that was her world. At least it was finally over.
There was peace in that thought, dark but real. Life was hard, she knew that better than most.
At least it was over. At least she hadn't abandoned Chris. She'd stayed till the final moments. One thing she had done right.
She couldn't lose another one. Not Chris.
Then something happened.
Her fingers… they moved.
A weak flex, but unmistakable. Her brow creased. Fingers shouldn't move in hell, right? She didn't believe in souls, and even if she was wrong, she doubted hell felt this real.
Her body shivered violently. Her lungs dragged in air like she was drowning. The cold bit her bare skin… and only then did she understand.
She was alive.
Tears hit before she could stop them. Relief, fear, and confusion crashing into each other. She tried to speak, but her jaw refused to move. Her head throbbed with a brutal pulse of pain.
Chris… Chris. If she was alive, maybe he was too. Please let him be.
She couldn't be alive when he wasn't. That wouldn't be fair.
Something sharp pricked her arm. The wrong arm.
Her mind froze. She remembered the flash of light, the cauterized stump, the smell of burning flesh. It had been gone.
But something touched skin that shouldn't exist. Something slid under it.
Panacea? Did Tattletale drag them to her? She remembered the blonde nearby as she tried to save Vanguard.
Her pulse spiked. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She tried to move. It was surely a hallucination… but her hand moved.
Her left hand.
She pinched herself. Hard.
Pain flared on her thigh… but the sensation in her hand felt wrong. Different.
"No…" she whispered, shaking her head. "No, no, no!"
Her eyes flew open. Dim, flickering lights. The hum of some machines she hadn't seen before. A musty smell from a place that she wouldn't have visited if she were conscious.
But the loudest sound was her ragged breathing inside her skull.
She was half-submerged in a tub of melting ice. Cables and sensors ran from her body to monitors. And beside her, another tub.
Chris. Looking pale, but his chest rose every couple of seconds.
"Chris," she rasped, feeling her throat burn.
Movement snapped her attention. They weren't alone. Three figures stared at her. One frozen in confusion, one full of pity, and the last one looking at her like she was something impossible.
The first was a broad-shouldered man, taller than Chris even with his habitual hunch.
Strange markings were traced under his skin. He looked like a gangster, and his cautious eyes didn't hide the appreciative glance he gave her before reining himself in. She ignored it… for now. She needed answers.
A gun hung at his waist.
The second was a woman dressed in black and silver, gothic, staring at Vista with wide, relieved eyes. Big-sister energy. It reminded her of Vicky after Dean's death.
That pain had dulled over the years. But Dean's death was not something she had surpassed yet. The jealousy she felt before over his relationship. The grief over something that was then impossible. The way she clung to Vicky was all thanks to their shared misery.
The way Chris had kept her from collapsing into despair, and she'd kept him from losing himself in his workshop.
And the last was clearly the doctor. He looked like the back-alley medics the ABB used to hide, tattoos on one arm, shirt stained with blood, glasses barely where they should be. He stared at her with his mouth open.
Vista blinked, trying to categorize threats, safety, anything… but her headache was blinding.
Then she saw her left arm.
Not flesh. Not her arm. A cybernetic limb connected to her shoulder.
Her breath hitched. Then she felt a full-body tremor.
"No…"
The panic struck fast in a way she only felt in nightmares.
Her chest tightened. Her lungs refused air. Every instinct screamed that something was wrong in the worst way possible. Her hands clawed at the tub's edges, scattering ice everywhere.
No… not this. She'd hated the idea ever since she saw what Defiant did to himself.
"Girl, calm down!" someone shouted.
The gothic woman, probably. Vista wasn't sure; her vision was blurry with tears.
Hands reached for her, gentle, like Vicky's once did.
Vista flinched away, heart pounding so hard it drowned her thoughts.
She couldn't breathe. The weight of the arm… of that thing twisted her stomach. She could feel it moving. Hear the creaks of the metal. Feel the disconnection from what she was.
Her breaths turned to sobs, then gasps.
"Take it off!" she screamed. "Take it off, please!"
"Easy, kid," the doctor said, raising his hands like Assault when he got serious. "You're safe. Just breathe. Don't move too fast. Your stress is spiking."
But she couldn't. The world spun. She couldn't focus on their faces anymore. Everything was spinning so much.
She had to get Chris. She had to move. She had to rip this arm off. Cut it off again if she had to.
Her strength suddenly vanished. As the exhaustion crushed her, the panic stayed. And she couldn't do a single thing to change it.
She collapsed into the tub, water sloshing over the sides.
Her last thought before darkness crept in was that she could still feel Chris. A faint pull, like a heartbeat next to hers, echoing inside her skull.
Then everything went black.
Jackie Welles
Night City, 2074
For a second, he forgot how to breathe.
The moment the girl's eyes snapped open, something in him just… stopped.
He'd stared down chromed psychos and the worst Night City could spit out, but this was different. Even the gonked-out cyberpsychos didn't compare. Not even the things he'd seen Arasaka do in Mexico put this kind of terror in his veins.
The look she gave wasn't human. It was something else.
Something in it made every cell in his body scream to look away. She was beautiful, a stunner by any measure, but something deep in his soul warned him not to let her think he meant anything by staring.
Twenty, give or take. Maybe a tiny bit younger. But a single glance froze him in place. The only comparison he could think of was standing in front of Rogue herself on a bad day.
Not that he had the honor to meet her yet, but that's how he imagined the legendary fixer.
His lungs finally remembered their job, dragging in air like he'd run a marathon.
Sweat rolled down his temple. He hadn't even realized he was holding his iron until the weight of it made his hand shake. The muzzle pointed straight at the ice tub.
For a moment, he hesitated. He didn't understand what the hell that was, but maybe it'd be smarter to… end it before it could blow up in their faces.
Misogynistic or not, if she made him feel like this, what would the hard-looking gonk in the other tub make him feel when he woke up? She had looked so soft while unconscious. Cute even. Like someone who wouldn't hurt an ant.
Unlike the scarred guy next to her.
"Chingada madre…" he whispered, forcing the gun down. "What the fuck was that, Vik?"
The ripperdoc didn't answer right away. He leaned against the counter, rubbing his face like he'd aged ten years. Misty knelt beside the girl, tucking a towel over her chest, whispering something soft and useless.
But that was Misty for you. She had a heart of gold. Something you didn't see around here anymore.
"She's alive," Viktor said finally, sounding wrung-out. "Both of them are. That's all I can tell you."
"She had a panic attack," he added thoughtfully. "Bad one. I've seen solos and ex-mil from the war with less severe reactions. I can't even guess what set her off."
"Poor thing," Misty whispered, brushing the girl's hair aside. "I can't imagine what they went through."
Jackie holstered the pistol, though his hand hovered close, just in case.
"Alive, sure," he muttered. "But what the hell are they? Some Samurai? Black ops NUSA?"
Vik sighed. "We don't know, choom. They dropped here last night… literally dropped." He snorted, though there was no humor in it. "Half-dead. Burns, organ damage, and missing limbs. No IDs. No cyberware. No data."
He shook his head. "Ganic, both of 'em. But… not anymore."
"Not anymore?" Jackie asked.
"Vik had to replace parts," Misty said quietly. She didn't take her eyes off the blonde. "Her arm, her skin, a few stabilizers. She was worse externally, but the guy… he was harder to keep alive. Organ failure, massive blood loss. The armor he wore made me think he was some kind of borg."
Jackie glanced at the other tub. The guy's chest rose and fell, slow, but steady. Jackie didn't know if he wanted to be here when he woke up.
But something Misty said lit an alarm in his mind.
"Show me what he was wearin'," Jackie said. His tone slipped into something he'd practiced backing V up on jobs. Authority didn't come naturally, but he tried.
He liked to think he was getting better.
Vik blinked. "What?"
"The armor, choom. That chrome cocoon. You still got it, right?"
Reluctant nod. "Yeah. Back there."
They walked to the far side of the clinic.
The suit stood propped on a rack, barely intact. Scorched, melted, jagged from where Vik had cut it open. Built to survive a bomb… and maybe respond with one.
Jackie let out a low whistle. "Dios mio…"
Together they hefted it upright. Even stripped, it was heavy. Dense in a way that screamed military-grade, but unlike anything he'd seen. He didn't even know what metal it was. Some kind of alloy, but not one used by any corpo.
Cables. Servos. Coolant wires. Hydraulics crammed so tight it felt like someone tried to shove a full mech under a man's skin. And everything seemed made just for what they needed. Not something manufactured en masse.
"Shit's heavier than a car engine," Jackie muttered.
Vik crouched, poking inside. "Look at this beauty… everything's modular. See these panels? They are swappable. Like nothing I've opened before."
Jackie frowned. "There are no serials. This ain't corpo. Not even Militech or Arasaka. Those bastards stamp their logo on everything they build."
And the tech didn't seem to come from any other corpo he could think of.
A pit formed in Jackie's stomach.
"You check it for trackers, Vik?"
Jackie could see the moment the pair froze like deer in headlights.
Misty looked up slowly. Vik went pale.
"…not yet," he admitted.
Jackie felt sweat drip down his brow. "Then do it. Now."
They scrambled to the task.
Vik waved a handheld scanner over the suit while Misty checked for active transmissions.
The seconds crawled, the scanner's hum mixing with Jackie's heartbeat. Both were beeping too fast for his liking.
Finally, a single chirp.
"Nothing," Vik breathed out in relief. "Can't find a tracker. Either it's off grid… or too advanced for me to read."
"Let's pray for off grid," Jackie muttered, holstering the pistol properly this time.
Silence settled over them, broken only by the machines keeping the pair alive. The strangers breathed evenly, peacefully. Like they hadn't almost flatlined thirty minutes ago.
Misty broke the quiet. "Jackie."
He turned.
"You can't tell anyone. Not Padre. Not V. Not your mother. No one. The fewer people who know, the safer they are. As we are."
He stared at her. "Misty… come on. Don't be naive. Whatever tech they've got? Eyes will come for it."
"Promise me." Her voice hardened.
It wasn't a tone she used often. It stopped him in place.
He hesitated before looking back at the unconscious pair. Two strangers from nowhere. One was missing an arm yesterday, and Vik fixed her right. The air in the clinic felt heavy. Just remembering that girl's glare made his pulse spike again.
He scratched his neck. "It'd be cleaner to end it now, y'know. Quick and quiet. Drop 'em in the Badlands. No one would ever find 'em. I don't know who they belong to… or what they'd do to us."
"Jackie!" Misty snapped, horrified. "How can you even think that?"
Maybe he'd spent too much time around V. Shame rose in his chest the second the words left his mouth. Even Vik almost nodded before guilt hit him, too.
"I'm just sayin'," Jackie muttered, no heat behind it. "We don't know what they'll do when they wake. They might decide we're liabilities."
"You can't know that," Misty admitted softly. "But I'm not killing the people we tried to save."
The disappointment in her eyes hit harder than any punch during Vik's training.
Jackie winced, looking away. "Fine. You win. I'll keep quiet."
He ran a hand along the scorched plating, feeling the melted edges.
"Still… this tech," he muttered. "Ain't corpo. We'd have heard of it. Hell, it's cleaner than anything Arasaka brought to Mexico with V. Maybe even better. They sent their best, and I still ain't seen chrome like this."
Vik shot him a half-smirk. "You think it's alien, choom?"
Jackie let out a thin, brittle laugh. "After what we just saw? I ain't ruling shit out."
He looked back at the tubs, at the strangers breathing in sync. Like something important was about to happen.
"Well… wherever they came from, guess we'll find out soon."
He exhaled slowly. "I just hope we live through it."
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