#coming out of vik's clinic after getting shot and resurrected etc. the first thing she does is check on him and he died since-

[astrovagrant]

urehghdhgdhghg. whf is generally... listen. she gets it. she understands why people end up working for corps - she was one of them. it put metaphorical food on the metaphorical table. it paid for medical bills, piling up. it let her keep the people relying on her afloat. she won't apologize for making the decisions she made and doing what she had to do.

cut bc Longe. post abt takemura mostly.

but she never liked the corp itself, and only pretended she did when she had to. she worked in cybernetics programming, not intelligence, not public relations - she was tucked away in a basement lab, testing software integrations. no one looked at her for too long, let alone cared about how strongly she believed in arasaka's great vision. and behind all that, behind the chip she let them put in her to dull the edges of her emotions, there's just a massive, massive onslaught of rage.

listening to takemura talk up the Order and Overwatch of arasaka like it's a benevolent patriarch makes her want to climb off the side of the unfinished building they're doing a stakeout on and just hit the concrete, it'd be faster and less painless than her head exploding.

takemura, look at yourself. look at her. both of us are from respective slums created by corporate bullshit. she's been in debt since before she knew how to count, inherited and generated out of thin air as everyone she cared about fell victim to the poisoned air, the poisoned water, the poisoned earth - all effects of corpos running amok, unfettered. it's not like he doesn't know - it's just that he's convinced himself otherwise. seen what he wanted to see. and she was like that, too, before leaving arasaka for good. she knew, conceptually, that there were worse things under her feet. that some of her work was being used for horrible things. but there was only the desperate tunnel of needing to make it through to the next paycheck. and she stayed until the very last possible fucking second because - because it was only on the brink of having them take the last ten years of her life away from her that she realized she couldn't rationalize that away, and she had to stop doing it for everything else, too.

so sure, talk to hanako. do whatever you've got to do based on whatever loyalties you've got to honor. but don't fucking pretend, don't fucking lie to yourself that you were ever anything other than lucky. you worked hard, but a corp is a massive beast. you just got lucky. every day you got lucky except for that one day.

just like her. every day she got lucky. except for that one day.

meanwhile johnny's just sitting over there listening to all of this and it's the most she's ever spoken about anything prior to the corp, really, and it's usually walled off in her mind behind the arasaka no-feelings implant, so he's... interested, but also so fucking. sad. he guesses. he's sad because she's sad. except she's just empty, and the only thing left (because there is No One left; they've all gone and the years she spent trying to keep them alive feel completely and utterly wasted now because who is she to fight entropy. who is she to fight the corps. who is she to fight the decay of the planet) is just a well of anger so deep he's surprised he's never tripped over it before. not that he pries, exactly, but it's so obvious now that he's seen it. she's got so much of it and so little of anything else left, and he hates to see a mirror in her in this way.

#whatsherface #tldr everyone in her family (that's a loose term it was a bunch of kids roughly her age that an old lady had taken in) got hit by - #- the same environmental disaster and fell deeply and horribly ill #a bunch of them died right at the start and then she immediately went into night city to get them medical care. uh oh that's a lot of money #ok let's start working. ok let's start scraping money out from every possible venue #okay let's give up everything about ourselves to join arasaka. okay let's let them put a chip in our head because they want us to work in- #-cybernetics and they say they need to protect their work. #and she loses them one by one by one and she was the person who was supposed to help them #the last one hanging on needed a huge procedure done that would get him through to the other side - this was after she left arasaka and was #working w jackie. and she just needed the fucking money so goddamn bad that the relic heist was really her only option #coming out of vik's clinic after getting shot and resurrected etc. the first thing she does is check on him and he died since- #the procedure didn't go ahead bc she had apparently ghosted. he died thinking she abandoned him #well now she's dying too. so it's all just alright. probably. #OK LONG TAGS TOO SORRY