404: Doom Not Found

- 10 years before canon -

She woke up to the sound of rain hammering down on aluminium siding. Not chrome bullets. Not screams. Just weather. Real or not, it sounded real enough.

V blinked at the ceiling of the apartment—plain, patched-up drywall with one flickering strip of blue LED across the top corner. Still the same room. Still the same bed. Still alive.

Her body ached in a quiet, ambient way. The kind that settled deep into muscle and nerve and didn't shout so much as whisper, "You remember, don't you?"

She did.

MM's face. The crackle of Black ICE. That split-second between pain and blindness. And then Victor—no, Doom—standing over her, rifle in hand, eyes blank.

That wasn't something you forgot. That burned itself in.

V sat up slowly. Her joints complained. Neural interface lagged for half a second before syncing. Viktor's repairs had been solid, but her body was still playing catch-up.

She wasn't chipped out like most netrunners—not with high-end optics or dermal weave or heat-capped limbs. What she had was grit and intuition. Old-school talent. That's what Victor saw in her. Maybe.

He never said it.

She shuffled to the small kitchen. The place they shared was barely two rooms. One closet-sized bathroom.

A couch they never used. Victor spent most of his time in his corner, tools and parts scattered like religious icons. She kept hers clean, out of habit. You couldn't afford a mess when you'd grown up scavving your way through Night City's gutters.

The coffee machine wheezed like it hated its job. She smiled. That was one of Victor's side-hustle repairs. Fixed with two different brands of wiring and some Maelstrom-modified components. She swore it brewed with a little kick of electricity. Probably did.

Victor was already gone. He worked mornings with the ripperdoc—his namesake, Viktor—and ran his little fencing ops on the side. Nothing flashy. Just enough to keep a profile without making one. V had watched it all unfold. Like clockwork. Quiet. Clean. Always in control.

Her, though?

She was bored.

Restless.

They hadn't talked about the alley since it happened. Since MM nearly flayed her brain from the inside out. Victor didn't do soft follow-ups or emotional decompression. He just was. Like a monolith wrapped in body armor. Said more in silence than most people did in a therapy session.

She respected that.

She also wanted to scream.

"Need a gig," she muttered, sipping coffee that tasted like ozone and copper. "Or I'm gonna lose it."

She'd done a few side hustles since getting back on her feet. Nothing fancy. Courier runs, light recon, a few minor data scrapes. Basic stuff. Enough to say she wasn't dead. But nothing satisfying. Nothing that meant something. Nothing like the promise she'd made when she was twelve, holding her brother's hand in a freezing alley and saying:

"We're gonna be legends. Like Morgan Blackhand. Or better."

Vincent had believed her.

Now he was gone. And she was still here.

That wasn't enough.

A chime hit her shard.

<< Kirk Sawyer: Got a line on a target. Bring a clean hand. Simple boost. Solo pair. 3K flat.>>

Kirk was green. Called himself a fixer. Looked more like a street-level parts vendor with a new haircut. But he had decent instincts. And more importantly, he wasn't a corpo handler or some two-faced Tyger lackey. That gave him a leg up.

She replied with a simple ping: <>

Her comm buzzed again. Victor.

"Should I be worried?"

V smiled faintly. "It's Kirk. He wants a car boosted. I can handle it."

"Heard that before. Still had to peel you out of a dumpster."

"That was one time," she muttered. "And I was barely conscious."

Victor's tone didn't change. Calm. Dry. Icy steel with a snarl underneath. "Sending you a ping. Keep it active."

"Seriously? I'm not some kid you gotta babysit—"

"Correct. You're someone who keeps almost dying."

V sighed. "Fine. Ping locked."

She grabbed her jacket—chrome-threaded, torn in the left cuff, stitched back with zip ties—and headed out the door.

As she walked into the storm-slick streets of Kabuki, she felt that itch in her bones again. That craving. Not for violence. Not even for money.

For movement.

For something real.

Victor might've mastered stillness. Might've looked down on the noise of Night City like a king observing his broken kingdom.

But V?

She belonged to the noise.

And today, she was going to make a little of her own.

---

Place was called Scorched Bun—a side-street dive near the edge of Kabuki, tucked between a ripper's clinic and a joytoy dorm, where even the rats looked like they'd given up on life. Kirk Sawyer liked to meet there.

Said it kept the wrong people from asking questions. V figured it just made it easier to disappear bodies.

The job had been short on details, long on promise. A carjack, quick pull, single mark, no crew. Kirk had pitched it like a favour. Called it "an opportunity", the same way corpos called firing squads "resource optimisation."

She didn't buy it. But she didn't walk out either.

Victor would've.

She could already imagine the way he would've looked at Kirk—like a roach that had figured out how to speak. He didn't respect fixers who couldn't clean their own data, and Kirk's shard was a mess. No solid timetable, no confirmed visuals, just a tag, an address, and a shrug.

Still, V had accepted.

Because she needed the work.

Because sitting around healing wasn't living.

And because she was starting to crave the silence a little too much.

Now she stood in the street outside, back pressed to a power junction, flicking through the shard one more time.

She'd memorised it twice already. But Victor had drilled the habit into her—never trust a first glance.

The mark was supposedly a minor runner for a car theft ring, operating out of an old lot on Charter Hill's fringe. Easy scrap. In and out.

She didn't believe that for a second.

Victor's voice buzzed in her ear.

"Still reading you. You want me to keep a ping active?"

"Yeah," she muttered. "Just in case this goes full brain-dance."

"You think it will?"

"I think Kirk doesn't know how to lie without flinching."

Victor went quiet. That was his way of saying she wasn't wrong.

She flagged the route into her optics and started walking. Her movement was careful now—less noise, tighter turns, no open sidewalks. Watching shadows. Counting exits. All the little things she'd picked up from him without realising.

Back then, she'd have gone straight down the main street, guns out, no plan past the door.

Back then, she might've ended up like Vincent.

She didn't think about her brother much. Didn't let herself. But when she was in motion—when the city around her stopped being loud long enough—he came back.

He'd told her they'd be legends. Said they'd make names like Morgan Blackhand sound small.

She still wanted that. Needed it.

But now, she wanted to survive it too.

---

The drop site wasn't far, a rusting lot near the Charter Hill edge, where the corporate shine started to flake off and Kabuki's grime crept in like mould.

V paused across the street, ducked behind a decommissioned vending machine with the price tag still blinking "5 Eddies or your teeth." The lot was fenced, chain-link and sensor-tagged, but sloppily, like whoever owned it wanted to look professional without paying for the real protection.

One camera hung dead. Another was blind, swivelling between angles like it couldn't decide what mattered.

Rookie mistakes.

Or a trap.

Victor's voice came through the ping again, a low thrum in her ear.

"Movement?"

"None. Yet. You still have visual?"

"Always. You're alone for now."

She didn't answer. Just stared at the car.

It was parked dead centre. A Kaukaz Bratsk—old model, good bones, customised with reinforced panels and what looked like fresh ICE shielding on the wheel hub. Not the kind of ride you leave in a dead lot unless you're trying to bait someone.

V scanned it anyway.

No alerts. No signs of locking daemons. Nothing pinged as hostile. But it was too clean. The paint was fresh. The windows—tinted but spotless. It looked staged.

She pulled back, crouched low, ran a passive net sweep.

That's when the gaps started showing.

The ICE shielding was fake—hollow code signatures, nothing that would hold against real intrusion. There was a false geolock daisy-chained to a shard-spoof. The car wasn't meant to be driven. It was meant to distract.

That's when the ping stuttered.

"V—"

And the world split open.

A feedback surge hammered her OS. Her optics stuttered, screamed in a wall of static. Her limbs went numb for half a second—then snapped back. Her interface bricked for just long enough to show her the truth:

The bait wasn't the car.

It was her.

Two figures moved in from the left—one high, one low. Both armed, neither moving like random gangers. V didn't wait. She dove back behind the vending machine, gasping as her HUD fought to reset.

"Vic—!" she hissed.

"I see them," came the reply. "Hold. Do not move."

Her fingers were already twitching for a daemon—anything to slow them—but her OS was fried. No RAM. No loadout. Her implants felt like ice in her veins.

Just her and her grit now.

She grabbed a can from the trash beside her, lobbed it high into the lot's centre.

Gunfire answered—one automatic, one suppressed.

Wrong angles.

They'd expected her to go for the car.

She didn't.

V bolted left, ducked under a wire fence half-eaten by rust, slid between two bins, and scrambled for cover behind a stack of rebar.

No plan. Just movement.

She could hear Victor's voice, calm as always: "They've split. One's tracking. The other's flanking."

"I know," she hissed.

"I'm en route. Seventy-three seconds."

"Longer than I need."

He didn't argue.

One of them was closing fast—no doubt enhanced. The footfalls were too light for someone that size.

She waited. Counted to three.

Then threw herself upward, knife in hand, and caught him by surprise. Slashed his arm—not deep, but enough to stall his aim.

He swore, staggered back. She lunged, drove her knee into his ribs.

The second was already circling.

She had to move. No time to finish the first.

She dove again, into shadow, breathing hard, blood singing in her ears.

Victor's voice again: "Thirty seconds."

"I don't have thirty."

"Then make them."

She laughed, breathless.

That's when she saw it: an old maintenance access, half-buried in garbage.

She crawled in, sealed it behind her with a scrap of chain, and lay still in the dark.

Her OS flickered. Then rebooted—half-blind, sluggish.

But her vision came back.

The world bled back into focus.

She was still alive.

Barely.

[]

She didn't know how long she lay there. Minutes. Maybe ten. Long enough for her breathing to stop sounding like a broken vent fan.

Her OS was limping. HUD barely stable. Pain pulsed behind her eyes—residual neural feedback from whatever cheap ICE someone tried to fry her with. Probably didn't even know her cyberware was this barebones. Probably thought she'd burn out like the rest.

They hadn't planned on her making it out.

They hadn't planned on her thinking.

She rubbed the grit off her hands, flexed her fingers. Still worked. Still breathing. That was something.

A faint crackle sounded in her ear.

"You done dying?"

Victor's voice. Cool. Unbothered.

"Barely started," she muttered. "You watching?"

"I was until you crawled into a garbage tunnel. Now I'm guessing."

"I made it."

"Didn't ask."

She closed her eyes. Let the silence press in for a second. Then: "I should've seen it coming. Intel was bad."

"No. Fixer was bad."

A pause. He didn't have to say more. She knew what he meant.

Kirk.

She'd walked into the job because it felt easy, because she thought she could handle it.

Victor wouldn't have touched it. Would've sniffed out the trap from two blocks away and left Kirk bleeding behind the counter.

But she was still learning.

She pulled herself upright, slowly, wincing at the ache in her ribs. Her knees felt like they'd been cracked with a crowbar.

"Can you walk?" Victor asked.

"Yeah."

"I'm two blocks west. Exit the tunnel. Take a left."

She followed his directions without question. No sarcasm this time. Just quiet compliance. She didn't feel like being clever anymore.

He was waiting at the corner—leaning against a rusted stairwell in a coat that looked like it had never caught dirt, arms crossed, eyes hidden beneath the shadow of his hood. The streetlight above him flickered and buzzed like it was afraid to stay on in his presence.

He looked at her. Didn't say anything.

She walked past him. Then stopped.

"I almost died back there."

"I know."

"I should've died."

He didn't answer that.

Instead, he stepped beside her, nodded down the alley. "Come on. You need water."

They didn't talk as they walked. Not at first.

But once they reached the edge of Kabuki's older sector—where the buildings leaned in like old men whispering secrets—she spoke again.

"Victor."

"Hm."

"Did you… ever lose someone?"

He looked at her.

The silence stretched long. For a second, she thought he wouldn't answer. That he'd keep it locked behind whatever walls he always carried.

Then: "Yes."

"Family?"

He nodded once.

"Me too."

Still, he said nothing.

She exhaled, the sound shaky. "I had a twin. Vincent."

His eyes narrowed slightly. A twitch. The kind of tell only someone paying very close attention might catch.

"He got us out," she said, voice flat. "We were running. Scavs hit the street. He held them off. Told me to run."

Victor's mouth was a line of steel. No pity. Just stillness.

"I never saw him again."

She blinked, eyes shining in the streetlight.

"He used to say we'd be legends. Like Morgan Blackhand. That Night City would know our names."

She paused.

"And I think—I think that's why I keep doing this. These gigs. These stupid, broken contracts. I want to believe it wasn't for nothing. That if I die out there, someone will remember."

Victor's reply came after a beat. Quiet. Cold.

"Then don't die."

She laughed once. Bitter. "Is that the plan?"

"It's the requirement."

They reached the apartment building. She leaned against the wall, the streetlamp stuttering above her again.

He looked at her, eyes shadowed behind his mask.

"You're not strong yet," he said.

"I know."

"You're not smart enough yet."

"Yeah."

"But you're learning."

She met his gaze. "From you?"

He tilted his head slightly. "I'm not here to teach."

"No," she said. "You're just... not leaving."

He didn't answer that either.

She followed him up the stairs. Quiet steps, softer now. Wiser.

The streets behind them buzzed with static and life, neon and chaos. But inside, the silence felt earned.

But Victor looked down at her, his eyes cold and methodical. 

Legend? 

Victor mused on those thoughts.

What good was a legend to a God?