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the-archangel · 10 months

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Samurai Rising

Kerry doesn't seem to have the right temperament to work in the service industry, so how on earth did he get on along on that cruise ship?...

“You, waiter! My steak is overdone, it’s a disgrace!”

The waiter, tall, dark and cute rather than classically handsome, walks smiling over to the couple’s table, “I’m so sorry to hear that sir,” he says with a formality edging on sarcasm, “I’ll get the kitchen to cook another immediately.”

Unsure as to whether he is being mocked or not, the irate man shoves the plate at the smiling waiter, “Well, good!” he shouts unnecessarily loudly, “And make it fast, we have friends to meet at seven.”

After an ingratiating nod, the waiter disappears through the doors to the kitchen, throws the meal – plate and all - noisily into the trash and sits on a counter lighting a cigarette that he pulls from behind his ear, “Steve, that fucker at table four’s send the food back again, says the steak’s not cooked right this time.”

“Shit man, that’s like, the third time this week. What a dick.”

The other man nods in agreement, “Mhm, he tips fuck all as well, think it’s time to add some special sauce?”

The waiter watches from the countertop as the cook carefully prepares another steak making the sauce as it rests, then hops off to join him at the hob grinning as both let a gobbet of spit dribble into the pan, a quick whisk later the sauce is poured over the meat and the plate taken to the waiting diner. “About time, you’ll wait while I see how this steak is cooked.” A knife is pulled through the centre of the meat which is split apart and examined closely, the man cuts a slice, uses his knife to slather it in sauce, and pops it into his mouth chewing thoughtfully, “Much improved,“ he announces haughtily, “I shall not have to speak with the Captain about this after all.” and with a wave of his hand he dismisses the smirking waiter.

Bursting back into the kitchen he pulls off his jacket – it’s the end of a double shift and he’s fit to drop, “Nice one Steve,” he tells the cook on his way through to the lockers, “he loved it, stupid fucker!”

“Preem work Kerry, you coming to the Golden Mermaid later?”

“Nah, shit to do, see you tomorrow.”

The cabins are small but comfortable enough, all Kerry needs is a space to dump his stuff and to play his guitar and it’s fine for that, he’s had an idea buzzing around his head all day and just wants to get it down before it evaporates, but there’s something to deal with first.

His phone had been buzzing away in his locker all afternoon, 8 missed calls and 13 messages all from some guy he’d met briefly a few times before he left, if he didn’t know better, he’d say the guy was hot for him, but he’d made it quite clear that he liked chicks over dicks despite the way Kerry had sometimes seen him looking at him when he wasn’t aware.

They’d talked about starting a band, joking at first but increasingly seriously. They were both into music and guitars, Kerry had talent, Johnny (the other guy’s name) had charisma, it could work, but Kerry had been down to take this job for months, his first after school, so the ideas were put on the backburner until he got back, except,

“Kerry, call me back you fucker, I’ve got us a gig but it’s on Saturday, THIS Saturday, like four days from now, I need you here.”

Kerry sighed, the job was supposed to be a three-month stint over the summer, to tide him over between high school and college, but it’s five weeks in and he’s seriously over it. On the other hand, it took his dad a lot of pulled strings to get him this gig, he was a pretty good kid but his parents could see he had the potential to slip into trouble with the guys he was hanging with, so this job was the perfect solution, could he really give it up for a pipe-dream?

He picks up his guitar and angrily strums out the tune assaulting his head, reaching for some paper to note down the words swirling around his brain. He plays on well into the early hours despite the blood on the strings from his still tender fingertips, finally falling into an exhausted sleep a couple of hours before his morning alarm.

Johnny was basically feral. Once caged, he was now free to roam the streets and cause chaos wherever he went, which he did with much enthusiasm. He’s only three years older than Kerry, but has fit being a soldier, a prisoner and a pariah into that time. Disowned by the family that never paid him much mind anyway, he found his way to Night City and to a party somewhere in Japantown where a 17-year-old boy is entertaining the crowd, playing classics on his guitar. Johnny usually affects a style of being disinterested and aloof, but this guy is interesting, playing tunes Johnny loves, captivating the party goers with his already husky singing voice and charming them with his banter and big, brown, puppy-dog eyes, he wants to know him better.

A crowd gathers to talk to Kerry when the music stops, he’s especially popular with the young men at the party Johnny notes as he cuts a swathe through the crowds and curls a silver arm around the musician’s neck, “Sorry guys, he’s coming with me,” he tells the disappointed crowd pulling a perplexed Kerry into a quiet corner of the kitchen.

“What the fuck?” Kerry hisses as the pressure on his neck is released.

Johnny shrugs and offers the other man a cig from his packet and a swig from his tequila bottle, calming him somewhat, “Preem playing, do you write your own stuff too?”

“Yeah, a little, bit rough around the edges still but getting there.”

“Yeah, same,” Johnny agrees, “maybe we could work on some stuff together?”

Kerry looks Johnny up and down taking in the straggly hair, attempt at a beard, wiry frame, startlingly intense hazel eyes and finally the chrome arm, “What happened?” he asks looking the arm over with his head cocked to one side.

“Shit mostly.” Johnny answers seriously before breaking into a grin making the other man chuckle. They spend the next hour or so in each other’s company talking about music, classic bands, favourite musicians and albums, trading numbers before Kerry is once more swallowed up by his attentive crowd.

Over the next few weeks they meet up a couple more times. In Johnny’s tiny one-room apartment they jam into the early hours, smoking but barely talking just feeding off each other’s riffs until Johnny finally announces that he’s going to bed leaving Kerry to either crash on the floor or leave, he chooses the latter. The last time they met was the day before Kerry set off for the ship, Johnny had tried to persuade him to stay with promises of a band, a tour, fame and all the groupies he could eat, but it was a dream, stuff like that didn’t happen to guys like them.

Kerry is beginning to think that maybe it should.

On breakfast duty the following morning, Kerry curses as he wipes a smear of blood from his ruined fingertips off the side of a saucer before putting it on the room service trolly. He’s tired and he hurts and he’s in no mood for pissy customers. He hates going into rooms when people are sleeping or just getting up, feels like he’s interrupting private moments, and indeed sometimes he is, sometimes he watches, sometimes (one time) he joins in, but this time a pleasant older lady takes the tray, puts some eddies into his hand and he moves along. The morning progresses unremarkably, people are kind, people are asses, same as every other day, by lunchtime he’s decided; the boat docks in six hours and he’s getting off and high-tailing it back to the City.

“What you looking so happy about?” Steve asks as Kerry throws the fussy diner’s plate into the trash once more.

“I’m getting out of here today, made up my mind, going back to the City.”

Steve looks at him incredulously, “How the fuck you getting to Night City from New York, it’s nearly three thousand miles?”

Kerry’s eyebrows briefly knit together, he had saved his pay and his tips and had a little tucked away from before, but it was going to take every enny he had to pay for that flight home. Seeming to brighten he tells the cook, “It’ll be fine, booked a flight, be back home in time for dinner.”

But where was home? He couldn’t go back to his parents all his friends were still living with their own parents, there was only one option…

After the call, Johnny sat on his bed looking around his tiny apartment, there was barely any room for his own crap, but Kerry had promised that he didn’t have much stuff, just a couple of bags and a guitar, so it could work for a while. They’d have to double up in the bed, pondered the Rockerboy, but he rarely spent a night here anyway so it shouldn’t cause a problem.

As the sky begins to darken, threatening a coming storm, he takes his car to the airport and waits by the arrivals board, there’s ten minutes til Kerry’s flight lands so he needs something to occupy himself, the bar opposite may be the perfect thing. By the time Kerry has made his way from the plane and reclaimed his bags, Johnny is deep in conversation with an attractive flight attendant and only the insistent buzzing of his phone alerts him to the other man’s presence.

“Where the fuck are you?”

“Jeez, what are we married now?”

“Shit Johnny it’s been a long day, stop being an ass and come take me home.”

“Ugh, fine, give me a minute.” He gives the attendant his number and stumbles out of the bar, finding Kerry by the exit, “You’re gonna have to drive, I’m flat out drunk,” he tells the other man before climbing into the passenger seat and slumping towards the window, they make it home but he rarely asks him to drive again.

With two days to go until the gig, Kerry and Johnny are interviewing potential band members in a bar around the corner from their apartment. Nancy is an easy pick, she brings a portable keyboard and can play any of the classics they throw at her and picks up their original stuff straight away, they let her hang around whilst they search for their drummer.

Potential drummers file in hammering at the kit set up on the stage, but none have quite what they are looking for being either too sloppy, too heavy or, in one case, too drunk to climb onto the stage. Johnny is getting agitated, they’ve got less than an hour until the bar opens and they get thrown out, more file in and out until a tall, beautiful woman walks deliberately up to the kit without giving them a second glance and belts out a perfect set. The sit staring at her for a moment, Kerry is the first to recover, “That was some preem drumming, you want in?”

She looks them up and down sucking air in through her teeth, “Sure, I’ll give you a go.” She says nonchalantly as she joins Nancy at the now open bar.

“Shit, one of us will have to play bass until we find someone,” Johnny drawls, clearly not keen on the idea.

“My guy plays,” chips in the new drummer, “I’ll bring him along to the rehearsal, see what you think?”

“Sure,” the boys say together, and there it was, Johnny and Kerry’s band, so far without a name.

Later that afternoon in a friend of Johnny’s garage space, he and Kerry are trying to think up a band name whilst waiting for the rest of the band to show, “What about ‘Johnny and the Moondogs’?”, suggests Johnny (of course).

“Don’t think so, no, ‘The Frantic Elevators’? ‘The Hype’?”

“Nah, need something with more edge, how about ‘The Rattlesnakes’?”

Kerry is still looking incredulous when Nancy comes in closely followed by the new drummer and a slightly dishevelled guy who must be her boyfriend, they are all chatting animatedly and seat themselves on the various bits of crap dotted around the space before looking expectantly over at the dilapidated couch where Kerry and Johnny sit waiting.

“So, we’ve got tonight and tomorrow to rehearse enough songs for a forty-five-minute set,” Johnny explains to his bandmates, “We’re on stage at nine, a hundred eddies a piece, any questions?”

“Will we get free booze?” the drummers boyfriend pipes up.

“Sorry choom, I doubt it. What do we call you by the way?”

“He’s Henry, and not that either of you ever bothered to ask but I’m Denny,” the drummer offers cooly.

Kerry looks suitably embarrassed while Johnny continues his speech, “So far we’ve got three original numbers ready to go, another two that need work, and a shit-ton of covers we could fill in with, be better if it was all originals though, let’s fucking do this.”

It’s the early hours when they finally sit together again, sharing a cig whilst Denny packs her kit away. They can now boast four tight originals, another in the works and a couple of covers that should blow the audience away. “What’s this band called anyway?” Nancy asks as she huffs out impressive smoke rings that seem to hypnotise Henry especially.

“Dunno,” Kerry admits, “We were talking about it earlier, need something memorable, something with an edge.”

“What about ‘Samurai’?” she drops in casually.

The boys look at each other grinning, “Yeah, Samurai. Thanks Nance, fucking perfect.”

The next morning, apart from Johnny and Kerry who never left, nobody quite makes it for the 11 AM rehearsal time, Nancy and Denny turn up at half-past and Henry is still nowhere to be seen at 2, but the boys have already put together a tight set. They’ll start with the chugging intensity of Hostility, Brutality to get the crowd going, followed by the mellower Seven Virtues, then the one that Johnny can see being a hit, Blistering Love, it’s heavy with plenty of chances to show off their individual talents on stage, a slightly psychedelic WIP that they hope to finish today that might be called Binocular Eyes is next, a couple of classic covers and finishing with the song Kerry wrote on the ship, Bleed the Beat, a vitriolic stomper guaranteed to leave an impression.

Overall, they’re feeling pretty pleased with themselves, but they are by no means ready and the afternoon is stressful with both Kerry and Johnny having firm ideas of what should be happening and when, generally they are in accord, occasionally they bicker but it’s nothing to the blazing row they spectate over when Henry finally rolls up at two-fifteen clearly higher than a kite. Denny marches him outside to have a ‘conversation’ and the rest of the band sit on the broken couch sharing a joint and watching the fireworks. Fortunately, it turns out that he can play better stoned than when he’s sober, so by early evening they’re ready to pack up and make their way to the Red Dirt bar in a borrowed van. Denny and Nancy make a banner of the band’s name in the back while the boys sit up front, full of nervous excitement, laughing and chattering about how big they’re going to be, how rich, how famous.

They are the middle of three bands that night, the best position to be in Johnny tells the others as the audience are warmed up by the first band, but not yet jaded. Sitting nervously by the bar Kerry looks out over the crowd as they cheer and dance to the opening act’s music, will they even like what Samurai has to offer if they’re happy enough with this scop he wonders, visions of the audience staring at them with silent incomprehension float across his mind, he guzzles his beer to chase them away.

Johnny has no such doubts, he’s nervous sure, but a healthy, buzzy kinda nervous, he just wants to get up there and give the audience what they’ve been waiting for all this time. If they don’t like it then, shit, they’ll just go find an audience that does.

The first band leaves the stage giving them just fifteen minutes to set up their gear and perform a quick sound check. Nine o’clock arrives, Johnny and Kerry look over at each other and grin, “We are Samurai,” Johnny screams over his mic to the crowd, “prepare to be fucked!” and they launch into the uber-heavy first tune.

It passes in a blur, the playing is the best they’ve done, the audience love them and are already screaming their names, everything is vibing and they come off stage drenched in sweat but ecstatic. Johnny is using an old towel to wipe his face when a guy from the club offers them another gig later in the week, Kerry is flirting with a guy who caught his eye from the stage when the manager of the Rainbow Cadenza offers them a gig the following weekend.

Sitting at the bar, slurring slightly from the celebrations, the five of them congratulate each other and drink to the future. Tonight has been an absolute blast, the best of his life, but there’s no way it can carry on forever Kerry muses, so he’s determined to grab every opportunity with both hands and make Samurai the most fucking awesome band ever for as long as it lasts, however brief that may be.

#kerry eurodyne #kerry is my muse #nancy hartley #denny cyberpunk #cyberpunk 2077 #henry cyberpunk #samurai #johnny silverhand

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civilization-illstayrighthere · 1 year

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ON HENRY, a cyberpunk 2077 short (625 words, no tw)

Henry is— Henry looks like the kind of guy that not only needs to be broken out of rehab, but goes along with it, incredibly willingly, at the age of seventy or eighty or however old the median age of the still-alive Samurai members were.

Which was, maybe surprisingly, everyone. Everyone except Johnny. V thinks that’s kind of embarrassing for him, being outlived by Henry of all people, especially considering the kind of booze-scented dumpster fire Henry was.

(V tells Johnny this, near verbatim. Johnny flicks him off, unappreciative, and with both hands.)

His continued survival was kind of a miracle; or, more accurately, a fluke. He’s clearly had some age-defying work, but whatever it was never took, or didn’t take well.

The dark bags under Henry’s eyes have that parchment thin look, marked with deep wrinkles like the rings on a tree that marked his true age. V’s sure the upkeep on that kind of shit had to take time and money and active care. And while he had minimal face lines, the relative smoothness contrasted strangely with the spattering of liver marks across his skin. Especially ironic, V imagined, given that someone like Henry had to have been on his fifth, sixth liver, at least.

Out of all of them, Denny looked the youngest— maybe especially so right now, picturesque in her righteous fury, the sun shining through her naturally greying crown of curls. Brandishing a bat, she looms over her ex-input slouched back in a poolside lounge chair.

Comparatively, Henry is a worm. He doesn’t look relaxed. He’s lounging but only because the shape of the chair requires him to lean back so; his left leg is twitching something awful, the line of his body held taut. The hands clasped and tucked behind his head in a caricature of relaxation are squeezing so hard all of the muscles in his thin, scarred arms are flexed.

V turns his gaze from the pair to Kerry, and almost wants to laugh. He looks properly chagrined already, and from the way Denny’s focused on Henry, V’s not even sure if she’s realized he’s even here yet.

Kerry has one arm crossed over his chest, the other fiddling with the earrings in his right ear. He doesn’t even seem to notice V until he’s standing right next to him.

“Oh— hey, uh,” he squints, “V?”

V doesn’t hold the question against him, just nods as he settles side-by-side next to Kerry, shoulders nearly touching. They’re basically the same height— Kerry might actually be a little taller right now, since his boots were slightly heeled.

“This is…?” V tilts his head towards the unfolding scene.

“Yeah. I didn’t plan this. I mean, I broke Henry out—“ Kerry gestures at Henry, one hand still almost protectively wrapped around his ribs, “told him where Denny was, and I didn’t think he’d, you know…” his gaze shifts back and forth, voice dissolving into mutters, “thought we were having a good time, had a few drinks, reminiscin’ a little. Not plans to, uh…”

Drive a concrete truck and all of its contents through North Oak and into Denny’s pool, absolutely obliterating it and her current home insurance premiums along with it. V can imagine. He snorts. It’s kind of funny, in a vacuum.

“How the fuck is he still kicking? He looks like shit.”

It’s not until he glances back over at Kerry, who’s giving him some sort of unparsable look, that V realizes it may have been too blunt of a thing to say.

Weaponized fist to his mouth, V clears his throat.

“Uh, I mean. How is he still…” he waves his hand, trying to find the word, “alive? Respectfully.” In V’s peripheral, Johnny stands there exasperated with his head in his hands.

#cyberpunk 2077 #cbp2077 #kerry eurodyne #johnny silverhand #denny cyberpunk #henry cyberpunk #cp 2077 #anyway…. IC henry roast #i feel like this is juuust short enough to not need a cut but i can tag this as something if its bothering anyone so they can blacklist o7 #stomping in a glass house

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