nexus_crossings | What's keeping you awake at night ...

"Good question. A whole load of stuff, pal. Nice arms by the way. Titanium or---something else? Steel alloy?"

Tony couldn't help but notice the man's metal arms which piques his interest being an engineer. The question had him thinking as he adjusted his sunglasses, placing them atop his head so he could see the man properly.

"Nightmares, mostly. Past events."

"It's mostly chromium. Not quite top of the line, where I come from, but a better modification than most can afford."

Zero's voice is low and has a certain grit about it that isn't a put on. It might make someone wonder if he was a smoker or spent a lot of time breathing harsh air.

His hands move with almost a flourish when he pulls the sleeve of his white trenchcoat down to the forearm. The hardware ends only just above the wrist and the other man will see that most of his arm is organic. He has reasonably good muscle tone for a middle-aged guy, but it's doubtful that he'd impress a superhero. His skin is just beginning to lighten from age.

"The other is like that too." Zero assures and positions himself back more or less the way he was.

"Your dreams and mine sound like they'd be old chooms."

Edited 2025-05-21 21:04 (UTC)

Dominic was wandering aimlessly. After spending most of his life in only two buildings Dominic was facinated with simply being outside and seeing other places. He looks like everyone else until he makes eye contact with the man who is speaking. Dominic's eyes are unnaturally, bright yellow.

"Training...and genetics." It was the most direct answer. He still couldn't get on the 24 hour days after existing on years of 40 hours awake and 8 asleep. There were other things that kept him up now but not as much as that habit and his genetics.

It's fashionable in his time and place for persons to have color changing features. You see it most often with the hair, of course. Young people love being able to change their brightly colored locks, at an instant, to match their wardrobe. The same tech exists for the eyes and even skin color.

The thing is, though, that even in a place where people can modify the color of their eyes at will ... you don't see yellow very much. It's rare enough that Zero takes notice of those bright eyes looking at him. 'They're somewhat predatory looking in a human', he muses to himself.

"Your answer ... c'est terriblement littérale, non?"

Zero is wrapping his mechanical index and pointer finger around a mid-knuckle joint that will never pop again. He's only ever trying to crack his mechanical hands because it still feels good in a way that he can't explain.

"Speaking on your genetics, though, have your eyes always been yellow?"

French is not a language he knows so it gives him pause, brow furrowed, as he puts the sounds to words he knows. This isn't the first time he's run into a language he doesn't know. In fact, it is happening all the time now.

"I don't know. I've always been this way." Dominic often heard from others that aspects of his life have, or were, terrible but it has been all he has ever known. He doesn't see it that way.. yet.

"All of the breeding project offspring have golden eyes but my generation and our children have yellow eyes. The gene is linked to the one that gives use better hearing and sight than those who were not bred." Dominic could have explained more but he had learned lately that not everyone understood or wanted him to go into detail.

Edited (Autocorrect is trash) 2025-05-22 12:41 (UTC)

Zero didn't speak French growning up, but he deals with creole speakers often enough that it slips into his own language now and then. And then there is his last name, which, suggests that maybe it's in his genes somehow. Night City is an amalgam of people and cultures, it all bleeds together after a while. It bleeds on you too.

"Always been that way is fair enough."

He listens to the specifics of the yellow eyes being offered to him. He isn't particularly literate in the health sciences, but he has the gist. He comes from a place where population is declining too, though they haven't needed to go as far as breeding projects.

"So then, it sounds like there's an authority in your life that you have to submit to. Or that you did at one time, anyway."

Edited (just bad at profreading and tagging on a phone) 2025-05-22 13:48 (UTC)

Dominic noticed this person's hands and frowned slightly. It wasnt that he was put off by them. No, he was thinking about how his government would kill off anyone who needed a prosthetic or had one at all. He had quickly come to understand that part of his government, prior government, was wrong.

"Our government is.. was...is but not mine any longer.. is totalitarian with thought crime and mental reprogramming for transgression." Dominic still got caught up on the feelings if being part of his society and yet no longer being part of it. "You don't submit to the Ministry exactly. You, I, was born to it."

"Sounds intolerable."

He can see the way the man is staring at his hands. The augmented person is common enough where he comes from that nobody would think twice about his hands in Night City, so it's been a while since he's caught anyone looking.

"They don't put you off, do they?" He said, clanking his metal fingertips together for emphasis.

Dominic shrugged. He was not yet far enough removed in time to have that opinion though his humanity would catch up eventually.

"I've never seen anyone with prosthetics." Dominic was matter if fact about it. "People who would need them are eliminated at birth or later in life. The Ministry seeks perfection of body." He meant killed but the language of the Ministry was still deeply ingrained in his mind.

"Oh. You think I had some kind of accident or a birth defect, don't you?"

Zero nodded his head slowly, a faint smirk drifting over his lips.

"These hands do more than the hands I was born with ever could. I payed to have a ripper doc take off the flesh I was born with for these. I can interface with machines in a way I couldn't before, bypass security that exists in my world, shoot straighter and punch harder."

He flexed the fingers open and closed. "It's the better, faster and stronger of my home. It extends to parts other than the hands, too."

Edited 2025-05-22 21:36 (UTC)

"If you made the choice they would still seek to elimate you. Both are crimes." Few understood the way Dominic's government operated but that was proably for the best. Their control was absolute and privacy non-existant, at least in the cities.

"You could be describing the reason I was bred. I am faster, stonger, better senses, better health and more resillent than everyone else." Dominic wasn't metal but he now knew he wasn't completely human either. "There is a doctor weaning me off the medications that were used to subdue my less desirable characteristics. I know why they regressively bred the subsequent generations."

"Must be a powerful agency for anyone to put up with all the infringement."

It's sort of funny to him that they didn't have their own upstart revolutionaries, but perhaps they had. It was hard to glean the nuances of someone's government in a passing conversation.

"And I damn well would resent anyone interfering with whom I'd choose to procreate with."

"The Ministry has been consolidating power for over a century. Once Big Brother was installed and the reprogramming began, few resisted. Those who do live in the wilds or the dead cities."

Dominic paused and that last comment obviously made him uncomfortable. In the silence he brought a hand up to rub his back between the shoulder and spine. "I wasn't... didn't know I could choose until a few months ago."

Dominic had been deep in brainwashing and deep in the Ministry before he was liberated. "What is your government like?"

He had a feeling this man was from a very different place than he had seen before.

Zero notices the gesture. It seems almost shy or bashful on the other man. For a moment, he wondered about what kind of knowledge gaps a person might have when one's government is trying to do all the thinking for you and he supposed he felt a certain kind of pitty for him.

"Ostensively it's a democratic republic, but now that they've rebuilt a bigger, badder military to push people around with ..." He lets his voice trail off. "The government is very interested in protecting its own interests and maintaining a good quality of life for wealthy people - but there are pockets of lawlessness, sometimes very large ones, among the non-wealthy."

"You ever heard the saying 'might is right'? That sums it up well enough."

There were a lot of gaps. Not that it would be surprising to anyone who knew even the basics of how Dominic had spent most of his life. Those gaps were closing quickly with his natural curiosity and quick wit and intellegence. Still, there were so many things, especially socially.

"We were bred to be the bigger, badder military. The Ministry is not pleased that so many of us have escaped into the wilds and gangs." He took pleasure in being a thorn in the side of the Ministry and that had been growing exponentially since he was brought out of it.

"No." He hadn't heard it but he had definitely run into many people who would believe it. He did respond, nearly mechanically with "War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. Poverty is Wealth. Big Brother is Watching."

The propaganda of the Ministry was still a reflex in Dominic's mind. Words spoken over and over until they were without thought when spoken. "They would add Might makes Right if it had survived the rewriting of truth over the years."

Zero, who had given up smoking decades ago, finds himself wishing for a cigarette. He hadn't pictured the conversation getting so political, though, he supposed it didn't bother him that it did. It just wasn't something he found himself overly thinking about in everyday life.

No, what was getting troubling was the thought that perhaps their governments weren't as far off as he wanted to believe they were. How easily his phrasing fit into their propaganda.

"Maybe the big difference between your government and mine is that mine just isn't big enough to do the things yours could. Otherwise, it may have."

Zero tilted his head to the left and the right, stretching out his neck until that did crack. The other nice thing about mechanical hands is that the joints within them never got stiff.

"So you're up at night because of habit, but do you actually want to be?"

Dominic nodded in agreement. He could see this man's assumption about the government being true. "There are four versions of ours and they rule most of the planet."

Big was maybe an understatement. He could see how smaller government wouldn't be able to get such a foot hold the way the Ministry had over time.

"I don't know." Dominic admitted. "I had no wants before I started deprogramming. The doctor helping me is focusing on the more dangerous parts of my programming. Sleep cycles, sexual programming, social programming are not priorities."

Dominic could only shrug. He had never even considered his sleep cycles other than how it made him off other people's sleeping time. "Do you want to be awake at night?"

Edited 2025-05-23 14:41 (UTC)

Zero makes a face at the mention of sexual programming. It's not an exaggerated response by any means, but it might give off the vague impression that he has some opinions about the subject. He had already eluded to some of them already, after all, but there was no reason to go on and on about it.

"No, I don't." The ever present rasp in his voice is a little less prominent when he speaks softly. "But I can, at least, use the time to think."

Dominic had seen that expression more than once since being freed and while he didn't feel it himself, he did understand. He knew not to ask as well.

"I have helped people sleep before." He said it and then realized it might not sound the way he intented. It was still a genuine offer. "I spend the nights working now. I appreciate not being alone, usually."

His instinct was to say no. He wasnt the kind of person that appreciated anyone doing something to him that he didn't understand.

He also didn't really know this man. The impression he had was that this was nice enough, but Zero wasn't quite ready to extend that level of trust.

"And how would you go about doing that?"

Most around Dominic were wary. He was an agent of the government and it was hard for people to trust anyone who had been in that position. He understood even if he didn't have the instincts to distrust people himself.

"I can do pressure therapy for relaxation." Before he went on his posture turned nervous. "I am learning other techniques now that I am being weaned off of the Ministry drugs."

"From warrior to healer, hrm? That's aspirational."

Does he sound like he means that? Perhaps. It doesn't sound overly cynical, but he doesn't exactly sound convinced either.

To some degree he's projecting. At one point in his life, Zero had been living his own version of whatever qualified as a peaceful existence in Night City and he'd ended up being pushed into violence. Now it feels like all he knows anymore.

He had found his was to do some good, now and then, but he was under no pretense that it made up for the wrong that he'd done. He was just ... surviving. As everyone had to find their way to do.

"I appreciate the offer, but I don't think it will address the problem."

Dominic thought on that assumption for a moment, slowly shaking his head no. "I was trained to be a warrior but when I turned ten and would have been taken out to make my first kill I was diverted to the Ministry of Love because my intellegence. I was 15 when I took the lead on improving the breeding project that created me." Dominic thought of himself as a doctor or a scientist far more than an enforcer like some of the others had been. That however, didn't make him any less deadly than the rest that had been bred. "My siblings were not so lucky."

He can't resist asking. "What is the problem?"

The longer he spent around others and off the medication the more Dominic genuinely wanted to help others. In some world, less apocalyptic than his, he might have been a compassionate doctor or found disease cures rather than what the Ministry had instructed him to undertake.

Zero shrugged.

The problem was that when he didn't have a task to accomplish or looking after Marcus to distract him, he ultimately didn't like where his mind settled. Didn't like the person he spent the last six or so decades becoming. There was no amount of acupressure that was going to change any of that. Even mental health therapy wasn't expansive enough for anyone but the most rich to indulge in.

"I've been through a lot of things I'd rather forget and when I settle down for the night it feels like it all comes back to me." He paused and then added, "I'm sure I'm not the only one."

"I don't have that experience but my partner has nightmares and worries." People had told him he might eventually start having nightmares but, as of yet, he hadn't had any. Dominic wondered if that was part of his mind that was still silent or mostly so."I have skills that I use to help but I've been told most people aren't comfortable with those skills."

The Ministry feared them enough to subdue his to the point he had no knowledge. Realizing others might fear his Empathy was easy to understand, even more so why he shouldn't reveal that to everyone. "I have done things that have fixed the few pieces of my past that I didn't like."

"I'd say most people are more comfortable with treatments for their physical ailments then their mental ones."

And in that regard, he supposed, he wasn't more enlightened than the 'most people' he was referring to. He wasn't eager for anyone tinkering in his head mechanically or emotionally. You had to be more trusting than he was now.

He'd seen trust repaid with unkindness way more often in the crumbling society that he came from. In the furthest edges of his memories he could remember a more civil time, but more from the way the people were nostalgic for it and the way the media that you could still find was portraying this time. Truly, he was to young to have appreciated the peace of those years.

"I wish I felt like I could fix anything that was meaningful." He said with a huff of a laugh. "I do find my way to give, but I don't think it measures the same way I've subtracted."

She takes a seat on the bench across from him, pulling out a small pewter flask. She takes a quick swig before popping the cap back on and tucking it away.

"Regrets, mistakes, the endless musings of how things might have played out differently..."

She lets out a soft sigh, her head lilting back over the back of the bench.

"... and the fact none of it matters. What's done is done, there's no bringing him back... well not the way he was anyway..."

She leans forward again, giving him a grin just wide enough to reveal a pair of sharp fangs.

"Though that's not to say I wouldn't be awake all night regardless."

Zero can't help himself. He's been grown old in a place full of dangers for the entirety of his life and in Night City ... you didn't reach your sixties without some wise defensiveness and a bit of luck.

She doesn't read to him as an immediate threat, but the presence of a flask strikes him as a little odd. He presumes alcohol, of course, and that makes anyone harder to predict. The teeth would be calculated as dangerous if he understood what they were. Vampires were stories from a forgotten age in his world and as such, he takes them as a fashion choice he doesn't understand. (He doesn't understand what young people think is trendy quite often.)

She is also noted by Zero as 'pretty', but it's about the last thing he's noticed while he was taking the stranger in. That sort of thing is inventoried in his mind, but hadn't been acted upon in quite a long time.

"What might have been ..."

He said the phrase with a fondness that wasn't normally heard in his voice. It was terrible to miss someone (or someones), but he had come around to the notion that the fact that he still had feelings of the loss decades later kept him 'human'. Still feeling things acutely was a priority to Zero.

"Could you see your life being different? If you knew then what you know now?"

"Perhaps... though untangling those threads of fate that led me to where I am now is... difficult..."

She takes another sip of her flask, licking the trail of crimson dribbling from the corner of her lip.

"Saving him one way would simply force me to lose him another... be it dying from his wounds and going peacefully had I chose not to turn him.. or him resenting me for leaving his traitorous little companion to fend for themselves in the wilderness."

She let out a sigh.

"I could certainly see things being different... but for the better, that's something I don't think I'll ever be able to say for sure."

Zero knows the sight of blood when he's looking at it. Its blood in her flask and she's ... drinking it? It makes his stomach just a little uneasy to think about. Sure, he's tasted blood. He's been punched and knocked around before. It's just that tasting it in your spit a little is one thing and drinking it is quite another.

"I don't think my case is so complicated. I'd do anything to have kept them with me a little longer."

He closes his eyes and shrugs.

"I know that doesn't mean that something differently tragic could have happened anyway, but I'd roll the dice."

"Oh as would I, but unfortunately one can't change the past. We simply push forward and learn from our mistakes, however tragic they may be."

She gives him a bit of a shrug, leaning back on the bench.

"Though that's not to say nothing good came of things... It's just a shame she had to grow up never meeting her father."

Her voice lowered a bit, more an idle musing than speaking to Zero directly. She cast a melancholic gaze towards the ground as her mind wandered to what could have been.

Zero winces when he hears the mention of a girl growing up without a father. In his case, he was the would-be father who got old with the passing of a daughter, but he understands the pain of familial loss. It has defined him in a number of ways.

He opens his eyes again.

"A family torn apart by loss is sadly common where I come from." He said after a slow breath. "Everyone's lost someone, it seems like."

She sighs, nodding in agreement.

"Thankfully she was young enough to not remember the horrid event... and had the heart to forgive this old bat for handling things as poorly as I did when she eventually learned the truth..."

She gave him an empathetic smile as she looked him over.

"I take it you've suffered something similar?"

"The old bat." He said with a brow raised and smile that could pass for charming. Considering the subject matter they'd been discussing, he couldn't summon a broad one for the moment. "Surely, you're not talking about yourself."

Zero took a breath and shrugged. He had spent enough years telling himself that everyone lost someone that he more or less believed it. Bringing himself to talk about it still hurt even now, yet, not talking about it made his loved one's seem even more gone than they were.

"The love of my life." He said, which was the only phrase he'd been able to come up with that did his feelings justice. "... and our girl."

She chuckled a bit to herself.
"Well, who else would I be talking about, though I must say, I look pretty good for someone pushing three-hundred..."

She took another quick swig of her flask, giving him a solemn nod.

"Something we have in common then... losing the one we held most dear. Despite my best efforts, I've never really found anyone who could fill that hole he left behind... Hopefully your luck has been a bit better..."

"Really."

There's a dose of skepticism in his voice and you can't blame him. Where he comes from there's not vampires or people that live that long, so you can't really blame him. She looks like any ordinary person from what he can tell, though he is a little unsettled by her flask ...

"I don't know if I ever tried."

He said with a shake of his head. Perhaps at the time he wasn't sure that he'd end up a one woman man, but he had known when he was falling in love with Renata that she wasn't like anyone he knew. So the idea that he could replace her at all was not something he considered. And since his daughter had not yet been born, losing her before he had gotten to meet her, was processed in its own way.

"I kept busy with work and then I started to wonder if I was really the type cut out for being in a family." He found himself reaching to crack the mechanical knuckles of his metallic hands. "I suppose there's been a few that might have called me a mentor over the years. That seemed a better fit."

She gives him a nod, leaning back on the bench a bit.

"I never thought I'd be one to settle down and have a family until I met Cyrus... and even then it was more of a cruel twist of fate that I was able to. It was a bit of a miracle I was even able to have a child... though the same circumstances that let such a wonderful thing even occur are the same that eventually led to me losing him... which brings me back around to your original question."

She let out a somber breath, shaking her head.

"Had I not been forced to turn him, he'd likely still be alive and well, but on the other hand my daughter never would have been born. Had I the chance to do it all again, it would be impossible to keep one without losing the other in a sense."

The books and movies you would find vampires in had been obsolete when he was middle aged. He knew of them, but they weren't real where he came from and he hadn't been in the nexus long enough to realize they might be real somewhere else. He was new to the multi-verse, after all.

So even as he was digesting her story, some of the details were sinking in better than others.

He recognized her being presented with an impossible choice. One that would have felt awful to have to make and left her unsatisfied either way. He could empathize with that, even if he couldn't relate to it or follow the supernaturalness of it.

"Doesn't seem fair."

He said, and swallowed down the thought that followed, 'life isn't fair, is it?' While true, it wasn't particularly useful to point that out in this moment.

She sighed softly.

"Oh I'm quite familiar with unfair situations in life. One might say my life has been full of tragedy... save a few glimmers of hope that keep me going."

She shrugs as she lets her head lull back a bit, gazing up at the sky.

"Best we can do is make due with what life gives us."

"Not the type to fall into the trap of vengeance, eh?"

Somewhere in a corner of memory and mind, Zero can hear the sounds of screams and bullets flying in run down old building. His agent, which to most would sound indistinguishable from the beep of any smart phone, chimes and seems to be ignoring both things.

At least for now, anyway.

"I remember feeling like it was the only choice I had."

"Oh god no, I do love getting some sweet delicious vengeance... though my circumstances are a bit more... complex."

She let out a heavy sigh, shaking her head.

"Besides, I've punished myself more than enough... I did what I had to do, but still... being forced to take his life by my own hand certainly takes a toll."

"I'm not sure I can relate to that."

Any of it, really. He hadn't been involved in the deaths of his small, would-have-been family. They just were with him on one day and were gone the next, leaving him to figure out how his life could have any meaning without them.

And. He hadn't found vengeance all that satisfying in the end. It hadn't brought anyone back to him. Nor had it made it any easier to go on without them. Though ...

"My tour of vengeance ended in a job offer."

What's keeping you awake at night ...

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