Chapter Text
Obito’s mother never makes a fuss about their lineage—her lineage, fat lot of good it’s done him—but one of his earliest memories is of her smiling and holding a finger to his lips, hushing him against the screaming of their cyberpsycho neighbor. Thin megabuilding walls do little to muffle the cacophony of its inhabitants, and Mr. Guiterro has screamed for hours every night this week, but tonight is worse, why doesn’t someone just call—
“C’mere sweetie, be real quiet and Mama will show you a secret.”
Obito sniffs and lets her wipe his face with the edge of her shirt. It’s thin, and not as soft as his blanket, but he quiets down and pads across the room after her. Neon shadows stretch across the floor, beautiful colors leaking between the shutters, no matter how tight his mother shuts them. They flicker and dance across the small box she retrieves from the top shelf.
His eyes water and he scrubs at them as she kneels beside him. The box is plain—dark wood cupped in between her pale hands, and when she opens it—
“Don’t touch,” Mama warns, and he shoves his thumb into his mouth instead, chastised. He’s so stupid, like a baby. “But look here,”
Inside the small box—lined with something soft that looks like the fancy couches at Mama’s workplace—lies a slender slip of metal. Silver and steel, with the faintest hint of gold striping at the very end. Obito’s seen things like this, in advertisements and on some of the shows that Abuela on floor 11 watches.
“A shard?” he asks, thumb sliding out of his mouth. The city outside as good as vanishes, so suddenly does his focus snap onto the treasure before him.
“Yes,” Mama murmurs. She points to a section of short, engraved lines, like the scratches he scuffs in the dirt. Like the signs outside, flashing into the dark of night: the city’s neon moonrise. “It’s our old family name. Otsutsuki.”
“Ot-so, suki?” His tongue trips over the unfamiliar word, eager to taste something that supposedly belongs to them. “Suki?”
“Yes,” Mama laughs. “Suki.”
“Is there a story?” Obito asks, eyes wide. “Tell me?”
Years later, all he remembers is a vague impression of parties at an old family manor—nestled in an idyllic Japanese countryside that might as well be in a different universe: champagne and sushi with real fish and air both sweet and clean. He remembers her speaking of a stern great-grandfather, older cousins, a daring bet, her fingers quick and light and the shard disappearing into her pocket. From where, from whom, for what—if she told him, he’s long since forgotten.
Someone calls MaxTac on Mr. Guiterro and the gunfire is much, much worse than the screaming.
Obito doesn’t ask about the shard again.
— — —
Abuela on Floor 11 watches him after school, sometimes. Less often, as he gets older and better able to fend for himself in the megabuilding corridors and common spaces. Her apartment is a revolving door of older girls and boys, men and women. Some come to talk shop, some to talk shit, and some just to eat tamales.
“Say, kid,” an older boy says to him one month, hands in his pockets in a way that speaks to casualness, rather than reaching for his iron. A cigarette dangles from his lips, bobbing with every word. “You looking for some work? We could use someone scrappy like you.”
“Leave the boy alone, Asuma.”
Asuma’s skin is tanned dark, his hair a warm brown that reminds Obito of the fake paneling that the nice apartments downtown supposedly have. His teeth are startlingly white when he grins. “Oh come on, I’m just giving him a chance to do something productive with his time! Better he pick up a few skills and some eddies with me, than sit up here with you like a—“
“You shut your impertinent mouth, Asuma—“
“—collecting lint and having his joints rust over before he can even chrome up—“
“Obito is a lovely boy, a huge help—“
Obito shoves his hands into his pockets. Hopeful, he asks, “I could earn some eddies?”
Asuma nods in the self-assured way of an old, experienced streetkid. “You betcha, kid. Eurodollars on eurodollars. Enough for all the after-school Naranjita you want.”
He stands up straight, trying to look taller. Older.
“What would I have to do?”
That light-bright grin flashes his way again, warm all the way to his stomach.
It’s simple, Asuma explains. He has a bar. Outside of the megabuilding. Sometimes his patrons get absolutely blasted and forget their shit. Obito is just going to take it back to them, because Asuma is a thoughtful, considerate choom like that, and Obito is small, unassuming, and looks like he could beat the average NCPD officer in a foot race.
Obito frowns. “What’s that got to do with it?”
“Don’t worry about it.” Asuma flaps a hand dismissively. “Just worry about keeping your nose clean. Don’t look too purposeful, either. Imma give you a few eddies up front for you to go get yourself a treat. Be sure to walk around with it, real casual-like. My chooms’ll be major embarrassed if word gets out that they forgot their shit at my place again. Got it?”
“Got it,” he nods. But then he remembers, “I’m not supposed to leave the megabuilding.”
Asuma squints at him. “Guess you better figure your shit out.”
The deception isn’t the hard part, as it turns out. He tells his mother he’s headed to Abuela’s, and simply… doesn’t go to Floor 11. Instead he takes the creaky elevator all the way down, to where the open air grows loud with the sounds of traffic. It’s an overwhelming roar, and then he follows the crowd out into the city proper, and it’s even more.
So many people, so bright—he can see for what feels like forever, and there’s so much to look at that the other pedestrians bump into him, cursing, when he can’t force his feet to keep up. Nothing in the megabuilding could have possibly prepared him for the vibrant chaos that is the city hidden in the night.
A skill that does transfer from the megabuilding corridors to the Night City streets is his ability to recognize trouble when it’s sizing him up, though, and he pulls his head out of his ass and scrambles toward the metro when he sees a few older streetkids eyeing him.
All in all, a scary but rewarding venture: he goes home at the end of the day a whole fifteen eddies richer, and with an extra NiCola, besides. And he’s also whetted his appetite against the sharp economy of possibility that permeates the streets of the city. Opportunity, promise, noise.
He snuggles into his blanket that evening and listens to the sound of passing AVs, and the distant call of the traffic down below, and thinks that soon he’ll be making enough to help out Mama. Maybe she won’t look so tired, if he can contribute to the household. Maybe she’ll smile more. The thought leaves him warm, as does the memory of the way Asuma grinned at him with the first successful batch of deliveries.
— — —
Maybe it’s because he’s too trusting, or not cut out for street life, or maybe he’s just an idiot, but Obito works for Asuma for nearly six months before he figures out that he is not actually returning forgotten property. It’s drugs.
It isn’t unusual for the regulars to drop off his radar—previously, he thought they maybe finally got their act together, and stopped forgetting whatever odds and ends Asuma’s bar attracts like magnets. But then he rounds a corner and instead of seeing Jugo waiting for him, there’s a Trauma Team AV parked and a full spread of medics packing up to leave. He hangs back, slipping behind a dumpster, and listens as one of the medics rattles off a report to a NCPD officer.
Heart attack, using a cocktail of drugs to counter the cyberpsychosis, bad interaction—
There’s a long plastic bag on the ground by the medics, and for the first time Obito opens his bag and peeks at what he’s delivering.
“Lace,” Asuma explains, scrubbing his bartop. “Glitter, too, when it comes around, but that doesn’t go through you. Don’t touch the shit if you know what’s good for you.”
Obito frowns. “If it’s so bad, why are we selling it?”
Asuma points a finger. “You are not selling it. You are delivering it, and you’d better remember the difference when the NCPD catches on, you gonk.”
Obito shrugs, still uncomfortable.
“People go their own way,” Asuma offers, reaching for two glasses and setting them out. At his beckoning, Obito slides into the stool in front of them. “All sorts of nasty chems out there, but my supply is clean, preem shit. What they order is what they get, which is more than you can usually say in this hellhole. And it keeps us with enough eddies to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads. It’s a win-win situation for everyone.”
“Win-win,” Obito repeats, uncertain.
“‘Xactly. But you and I know that there are better vices,” Asuma says with a conspiratorial wink, and he pours him a small glass of liquor.
It burns the whole way down, as if Asuma had found a way to bottle up the warmth in his smile, the way his eyes crinkle at the corner, the way Obito feels safe in his dark, run-down bar. It hurts and he sputters something awful, but the moment his airway’s clear he wants another taste.
“I like it,” he says quietly.
“That’s my boy,” Asuma grins. “You take after me.”
He pours him another.
Obito spends all the next morning heaving his guts into the men’s room’s toilet, and by the time he manages to drag himself to his feet and head home he isn’t even worried about what his mother will think of him skipping school.
He collapses onto the couch, face down and sticky with sweat and the summer heat, and promptly passes out.
— — —
He awakens one night to thunder, the shaking of the megabuilding around him, lightning flashing across the plasti-tile floor. It’s dark in the apartment, and his mouth is dry, and—
And his mom is nowhere to be found. Shouldn’t she be home by now?
He fumbles for the radio-clock. 8 pm. She should be home.
— — —
Obito waits all night with only the flickering ad screens for company but she doesn’t come home.
— — —
He does the laundry and cleans up, takes out the trash to the chute at the end of the hall and she still doesn’t come home.
— — —
It seems like it rains for the whole week straight.
— — —
The guard at the swanky office building Mama works at almost doesn’t let him through, but he insists, and something about either his panic or his age softens the armored man enough to let him through.
“I’m sorry sweetie,” the secretary says, squinting at her screen. “She’s not in our records.”
Something cold runs down his spine. “At all? But she had to have been here earlier this week! She was at work on Monday!”
The lady shakes her head, sending tendrils of neon-green hair fluttering against the wires embedded in her cheeks. “She would have been in our system if so. But there isn’t any record of her.”
It doesn’t make sense. Obito remembers meeting her coworkers, sitting in her office chair, hiding from her boss behind the desk, trying not to giggle.
“I don’t understand,” he says, blinking furiously. He’s not a baby, so it isn’t crying. “It doesn’t make sense. She works here and she’s missing.”
A heavy hand—too heavy to just be organic, so chromed-up—grips him by the shoulder.
“She said she can’t help you,” the armed guard says, curt. “Your scam’s not gonna work. Time to go bother someone else.”
A car slams into a supply truck right as he’s tossed to the curb and the noise of the wreck makes it seem like the city’s screaming with him.
— — —
He comes home and instead of his mother, Megabuilding staff are in their apartment. Their nearly-empty apartment: all of their stuff (photos, clothes, the few stuffed animals he hasn’t grown out of) is scattered across the floor outside.
Panic and confusion are beginning to be unfortunate, familiar companions.
“What are you doing?”
“Are you the tenant?”
Obito grips his hair, spinning around. Everything’s a mess, mom will be so mad when she gets back, and he’s been trying so hard to keep everything clean for her—
A datashard is shoved into his hand, branded in a horrid red color.
“We are legally required to provide you an eviction notice in advance, here’s a written copy. You have fifteen minutes to gather your personal belongings; anything left will be incinerated”
He gapes for nearly thirty seconds, gripping the cold shard, wondering how on earth he’s supposed to take all of their stuff with him, when he remembers—
The family shard.
The otsa- otsu… suki?
The family shard, the only thing in the entire apartment that is uniquely theirs, theirs and theirs only—why didn’t he think of that sooner? What if it has a clue about where she went? He has to get it, has to keep it safe—
The top shelf is already bare, stripped of his life.
He tears through the trash bags, searching and searching and—
His fingers close around a small box, dusty and dirty but inside the shard gleams brighter than any chrome. Pure silver, almost enough to make his eyes water. Unbroken but for the golden etching of foreign characters—if only he had optics and a translator implant…
Obito can’t bring much, just a backpack and clothes and the few things that looked important enough to save for Mama, but he walks away with the family shard tucked safely in his pocket.
The rest of his life remains scattered upon the megabuilding corridor floor, mixed in with trash.
— — —
He shows up on Asuma’s doorstep looking like a drowned cat.
The bar patrons don’t even give him shit, he looks so pathetic. One of them recognizes him, waving him into the warm, smelly interior.
Asuma is behind the bar, swearing furiously at someone as he mixes a drink, and Obito nearly starts crying on the spot when he sees him.
“Mom’s gone,” he says, tongue tripping in an attempt to explain himself. “She’s gone and she still hasn’t come back and it’s like she doesn’t even exist at her work and they’re kicking me out—“
“Woah, woah kid,” Asuma kneels down, face-to-face. He smells like bourbon and cigars and like he can fix this. “Slow down, talk me through it.”
He does.
He has to wait until after the bar closes. That’s the deal. Asuma will help, but he can’t just drop everything and leave. Eventually, even Obito’s anxiety isn’t enough to keep him awake and he falls asleep in a booth, curled up around his backpack.
Asuma shakes him awake, hands him an umbrella and a raincoat five sizes too big and leads him out into the night.
The NCPD station is bright and cold and Asuma is a live wire ready to snap the whole time, leg bouncing and lips pressed tight, his easy smile nowhere to be found. The clerk looks at them suspiciously, but calls an officer to take their report all the same.
Officer Yang is young and sharp, her questions cutting to the point of being upsetting. But she listens to his answers, his concerns, she nods like she believes his story, and she looks him in the eye and tells him that they’ll get to the bottom of this.
Questions and questions and Obito answers them faithfully, holding back the wetness in his eyes because Asuma is there. Then they have to wait for the NCPD’s netrunner to pull his school records—which, miraculously, do have his mom’s name listed, as well as her place of employment, so he isn’t crazy—but they otherwise can’t find any mention of her anywhere.
No tax records, no lease agreements, nothing in the Night City license or cyberware databases, even her phone number turns up nothing.
Officer Yang frowns at the file, at all of the empty spaces where Obito’s mom should be, and it’s like a light turns off. She slowly turns away from the computer, and doesn’t quite manage to meet his eyes.
“We’ll let you know if we find anything,” she says carefully, suddenly detached. “Someone will call you. Do you have a place to stay?”
Obito’s head reels at the change in tone. “What?”
“Do you have a place to stay?” She repeats. “If not, I’ll call a caseworker for you, to get you—“
“He‘s staying with me,” Asuma says suddenly. “My grandma’s his neighbor. No need for a social worker.”
Officer Yang looks like she might protest, but there’s a slight look of—guilt?—and she nods and lets them leave.
“We’ll call with any updates,” she says as they leave, but the conviction is gone from her voice, leaving only a weak, syrupy politeness.
“They’re not going to do shit,” Asuma mutters, herding him outside. The sun must be coming up, because the sky is starting to lighten ever-so-slightly, but it’s still raining enough to disguise the few tears that Obito allows to escape down his cheeks.
— — —
“I think you probably have to go to school, kid.”
Obito picks at his cereal. The synthmilk is on the edge of going stale, but he wouldn’t have an appetite even if it wasn’t.
“Listen.” Asuma sits down across from him. “Here’s what we’re gonna do.”
Obito perks up at the tone: it’s Asuma’s business tone, the one that says listen to me and I have it under control and we’ll be okay,
“You’re gonna haul your ass to school—“
Obito deflates just as quickly.
“—hey, hear me out. You go to school, I’ve got you transferred to one that isn’t in the megabuilding. But you go there, you keep your nose clean, and then you come back and run for me on weekdays, not just weekends. And while you’re making deliveres, you can ask the clients if they’ve seen anything about your mom, yeah? And maybe you have a lil trouble finding their order if they don’t wanna talk to you. You catch my drift?”
Obito looks up, blinking. “Extortion?”
Asuma shoots a finger-gun at him. “That’s my boy. Now go get out there.”
The noise of the city sounds like opportunity again.
Maybe it’s just his determination.
— — —
“NCPD, we have a warrant!”
Nighttime in the city is never quiet, not in Watson and certainly not while living above a bar, but the sound of the door being kicked down is enough to startle him awake. He sits up from his spot on the couch, squinting in the direction of the staircase, as the patrons go wild.
Asuma‘s voice carries over the chaos of yells, through the floor. “I’ve told you before where to shove that warrant, Daniels.”
Officer Daniels sounds supremely unimpressed. “As much as I’d love to, Sarutobi, I have a duty to follow up on a lead.”
“Look all you want, asshole,” Asuma fires back. “You won't find shit. There’s nothing here.”
One of the other officers snorts. “What, you sell your whole stock already?”
“That accusation would be insulting if it wasn’t baseless, you gonk!”
There’s creaking on the stairs, and then Obito’s staring down the barrel of a gun.
“Uh, we got someone else up here.”
Asuma’s voice is so loud it carries through half the bar. “The kid’s mine! Be nice!”
“Bring ‘em down here, Rogers,” Officer Daniels yells.
It’s a borderline interrogation, the way they sit him at the counter and ask over and over if his parents know he’s here, if he’s being held against his will, if he’s being mistreated or—
“Oh come on, that’s a bit harsh,” Officer Daniels says, coming back in. “It’s Asuma. He’s alright. Bit stupid, but not a monster.”
Asuma—who’s spent half the time telling Obito he doesn’t have to talk without a lawyer and the other half the time answering questions for him—glares.
Officer Daniels doesn’t even spare him a glance, addressing Obito directly, “I checked on your mom’s case, kid. Still no updates on her, but we’ll call when we find something.”
The questions shift in tone, then, but Obito’s eyes start watering halfway through and Officer Daniels seems to lose steam.
And then it’s finally over, and Obito watches the officers leave with Asuma’s hand securely on his shoulder.
“Did you mean it?” he asks.
“Hmm?”
“What you told Officer Daniels,” Obito says quietly, half-afraid he’ll be laughed at. He scuffs at the worn flooring with a socked foot. “That I’m your kid.”
Asuma grips his shoulder harder, gives him a loose, playful shake.
“Until we find your mom, kid. For sure. We’re chooms, right?”
Obito’s eyes prickle and his throat is tight but he whispers in affirmation,
“Chooms.”