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And I never wanted anything from you
Except everything you had and what was left after that too, oh
Happiness hit her like a bullet in the back
Struck from a great height by someone who should know better than that
It was supposed to be an easy job that paid well. At least, that’s how it looked on paper. Data recovery for a client who’d had sensitive information stolen from his personal server. It took River no more than three days to track him down, with help from Ve who had traced the netrunner through Night City’s subnets. The intrusion into the server had been clean and precise, but it had left a few traces. A Voodoo Boy from Dogtown, whom River then set out to locate in the real world.
Dogtown… Not exactly the area they preferred to work in. River had been there once back when he was still a badge and had nearly got killed. Ve had connections there thanks to Mr. Hands and would slip in from time to time when necessary, but always with a metallic taste in her mouth and never alone. The kind of place that made Northside look like a quiet suburb.
They arrived at the foot of the building once night had well and truly fallen. Ve moved slowly toward the window that would serve as their point of entry, hugging the walls, knife in hand. Behind her, River followed, moving more stealthily than a man of his build might suggest.
“How many?” he asked as Ve scanned the area.
“About twenty, all armed. And mostly netrunners, so watch your chrome too,” she replied before activating the extra layers of I.C.E. she’d added to their cyberware some time ago, after a mission during which River’d been hit with a quick hack that took him a few days to recover from.
Ve then hacked into the building’s subnet. The security was decent but nothing outstanding. Thirty seconds. That’s how long it took her to create a loop of footage from the cameras and redirect it to the security room’s monitors. Then they snuck into the building, like two shadows.
They climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, the level where they would find the access point leading to the Voodoo Boys’ data servers, located two floors higher.
“Shit…” Ve whispered, poking her head through a door to check if the coast was clear.
“Shit how much?” River asked, more out of reflex than concern. He knew that if Ve had spotted them before they spotted her, it was the Voodoo Boys who were in trouble, not them.
“Two. Invisible on the scan, that’s why I missed them. Those Dogtown bastards are really a cut above the gonks from Pacifica…”
“But not as good as you,” River said, putting his head above Ve’s to assess the situation. “What do you suggest?”
“Option A: I knock them out with a hack. Option B: You do your thing,” Ve replied with a faint smile.
“My thing?”
“Yeah, you know. Your big tough guy thing that scares people,” Ve continued, stifling a laugh.
A silence. Then, in a tone halfway between annoyance and amusement: “I’m a professional, Ve. I apply what I was taught at the NCPD academy. And we don’t call that scaring people, we call it neutralization techniques.”
Ve smiled. River did too, inwardly. She knew it, even if he never showed it during a job.
In the end, they opted for a combination of both options. Ve launched her Contagion daemon, and River finished the job by knocking them out with well-placed punches. The way was clear.
They made their way through the building’s labyrinth of corridors. Ve hacked the locked doors blocking their path, while River provided cover. It was a ritual they had developed when they first started working together and had perfected over the years. A dance between the real and the virtual that no longer needed words to function.
The data was exactly where it was supposed to be. A secure server, but not secure enough for Ve, who retrieved what they had come for before launching a formatting daemon to erase all traces of her intrusion into the system.
It was when they headed for the exit that everything went wrong. A silent alarm had been triggered; they had been spotted. Ve launched a Ping and saw through the walls that all the Voodoo Boys in the building were heading toward them. The servers were apparently better protected than she’d thought.
“Fucking Voodoo Boys…” she grumbled as she activated her cyberdeck.
“No other way out?” River asked, drawing his gun.
“Nope. Unless you feel like jumping off the third floor.”
“We’ve done worse.”
“We’ve done worse. But this time there aren’t any dumpsters to catch us.”
Ve would remember what followed only in fragments. The space turned into a battlefield once they reached the second floor. River, whom a bullet grazed close enough to cut his arm, kept moving forward anyway, because that was always what he did when he switched into ‘Ve's protection mode’ and was no longer quite himself. Hacks came one after another, on both sides. Ve’s system overheated, bringing her to her knees and causing her to lose consciousness for a few seconds before she regained her senses in total darkness, surrounded by the smell of gunpowder, as her Kiroshis rebooted. And she felt panic. Not panic for herself and River, but for Alma. Not her, not like this. Their daughter didn't deserve to lose her parents the way they had lost theirs.
Fortunately, River was there. Ve felt a metallic hand pull her off the ground and guide her through the gunfire while she was still blind. And they ran. For a long time.
The air was heavy and humid when Ve’s Kiroshis finally reactivated, and she was blinded by some bright light in the middle of the night. River had led them to safety on a walkway overlooking the Heavy Heart. Being in plain sight might offer them the best protection. The Voodoo Boys wouldn’t risk a fight in the middle of the street, which would only have drawn the attention of the Barghest, who had been trying to eradicate them from Dogtown ever since Hansen’s death and the new policy Hands was enforcing through the puppet he’d put in his place.
“Your arm…” Ve said, once her vision had returned to normal, as she approached River.
“I’ll be fine, babe, don’t worry about it. I’ve been through worse.”
“River…”
“I’ll be fine, I told you.” He paused to take a deep breath. “It’s more you that worries me. What the fuck was that?”
“Five of them joined forces to take me down while I was focused on the one who wanted to hack you. My I.C.E. didn’t hold up,” she explained, head bowed, trying to figure out how it could have gone this far.
“You passed out,” River sighed.
“Just for a few seconds,” she retorted, feeling her throat tighten at the thought of how it could have ended if he hadn’t intervened in time.
“Damn it, Ve…”
She heard something in River’s voice that made her lift her face toward him. He wasn’t looking at her. He was staring into the void with something different in his eyes. Something she had never seen in him before, something that seemed to intensify as the adrenaline wore off.
“I thought you were dead,” he said finally. Plainly.
“I’m still here.”
“I know.” River looked down at his hands. The organic one, bearing the marks of the blows he’d struck to clear a path out of the building, and the chrome one, which had been powerful enough to lift Ve without her having a say in the matter. His hands were trembling. Yet River never trembled, not when he was in his professional armor.
“I’m still here,” Ve insisted. It was the first time she’d seen River so shaken after a job that had gone wrong.
“Ve, marry me.”
It wasn't even a question, just an order, and the silence that followed was so heavy it drowned out the din of Dogtown all around them.
“Say that again,” she requested after a few seconds.
“You heard me just fine.”
“I wanna hear you say it again anyway, just to make sure I’m not still in a daze and not dreaming.”
River lifted his head to move his gaze from his hands to Ve’s eyes. “Veronika Sikorski, marry me.”
Ve opened her mouth. Then closed it. Several times. Frowning. It was one of those rare moments when she was at a loss for words, and even for sarcasm. Then she quickly ran through the situation in her head, without really knowing what was happening.
“What’s going on here? Are you in shock? Did you get hit on the head?” she worried, faced with this surreal moment.
“No,” he replied, looking away again.
“Because ever since I’ve known you, you’ve been saying that…”
“I know what I said,” cut in River, turning his back on her.
“That marriage isn’t for you. That…”
“Ve."
“That because of that bitch, it's something you can't even consid…”
“Ve,” he stopped her in a soft but firm voice. “I know what I said.”
She fell silent and took a moment to look at River. She could see that something was different about his posture, less confident than usual. That behind the exhaustion, behind the anxiety, there seemed to be something else, and that this proposal just came from his gut and that it surprised him just as much as it did her.
“Why now?” she asked softly, placing a hand on River’s slumped shoulder. “Why after all this time? What happened?”
It took him a while to turn toward her. A little longer still before he answered.
“When you lost consciousness, when I saw you on the ground…” River began, choosing his words carefully. “That rage that takes me over when people mess with my loved one, it left, and I became aware of the reality around me. And my only instinct was you. Not to take them down, but you and only you. So I grabbed you and got us out of that hellhole, when I usually just shoot until there’s not a single one left standing.” He paused to sit on the low wall behind him, his legs unable to support him anymore. “And as we were escaping, I thought of you, of all those years with you. Of who we are. Of Alma. Of what we’ve been through and built together without ever really taking the time to talk about it, because that’s just how we are: we move forward without ever looking back. And I realized I hadn’t given you everything.”
Ve felt her heart tighten in her chest, tears welling up. “River…” she whispered.
There was something new in his eyes. Something that felt like a self-evident truth he had never wanted to accept until then. “I didn’t give you everything because there was this thing I was holding back. Out of fear. Because once, a woman decided to dump me when I was in a coma. And I decided that word, ‘marriage,’ wasn’t for me anymore.” River paused to look at Ve, whose tears were now streaming down her face. “But you’re not her. You never left, you never gave up on me even when I was at my lowest, even when I was being an ass. Even knowing that I’d never propose to you, though I know that deep down, you want it, even if you pretend otherwise.”
Ve smiled through her tears. She wasn’t surprised that River suspected she’d always claimed marriage wasn’t for her either, without ever really meaning it. Which had indeed been the case at first, but then she’d started telling herself that maybe, after all, she might want it. Maybe she wanted something more. She’d accepted, though, that it would never happen and was fine with that because River meant more to her than an institution that had never held any value in her eyes before he became a part of her.
Ve had been silent for too long. She knew it. She could see from the tension in River’s shoulders that he was trying to interpret that silence and wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.
“I don’t even have a ring…” he finally said, his expression looking dangerously close to panic. “And I don’t even know why. I mean, we’re in Dogtown, for fuck’s sake. We almost got shot and…”
“Riv...”
“And it’s not romantic at all. I didn’t even prepare for this. This is truly the lamest proposal…”
“River.” Ve interrupted him, placing a finger on his mouth. “Yes.”
He looked at her for a moment, as if recalibrating his emotions. “Yes?” he repeated, in that slightly cracked voice Ve only heard during River’s moments of vulnerability.
“Yes.” She held his gaze, smiling. “What did you think I was gonna say?”
“Dunno… I never know with you,” he replied, letting out a sigh of relief before pulling Ve close.
“That’s why you love me,” she said, cupping River’s face in her hands.
“That’s mostly why you drive me crazy,” he retorted, resting his forehead against Ve’s.
And they stayed like that, smiling a rare, wholehearted smile that reminded them that life was beautiful despite everything.
**********
They got married two weeks later, on a Tuesday. A day they hadn’t really chosen. Not for lack of romanticism, but simply because that was the only day when their few guests were all available. Ve had then hacked into the city hall’s subnet to make sure that the schedule of the registrar who would marry them suited them, all from the comfort of her home. The kind of thing that made River say that netrunning had its good points sometimes.
There was Mamá Welles, who had made the effort to put on a dress for the wedding of her daughter at heart.
There was Vik, who had dug out his one and only suit, which he saved for special occasions.
There was Misty, who had tucked a photo of Jackie into her clothes so that he could be present at su hermana’s wedding, in a way.
There was Joss and the twins; Randy couldn’t make it, but he had sent a congratulatory message to Ve and River.
And of course there was Alma, who’d prepared a fairly detailed list of what she wanted for her parents’ wedding, complete with drawings and various notes, but who’d had to face the reality of such a short planning timeline.
As for the rest of their friends, they would join them later at Coyote Cojo, where Mamá Welles had already prepared everything for a simple, warm evening to celebrate the happy occasion.
The city hall’s wedding hall smelled a whiff of curry, likely the lingering scent of the registrar’s lunch. It was a functional, unpretentious room, with a counter, two rows of benches on either side of the space, and the Night City logo looming over it all. The registrar who would handle the formalities was a middle-aged man who looked like he’d officiated enough weddings to know that most didn’t make it past the first year.
Everyone was there, starting with River, who had arrived first to make sure everything went smoothly. Even though it was an intimate and somewhat informal ceremony, he wanted it to be a beautiful memory. For the occasion, he had even dressed more smartly than usual, in black pants and a white shirt, all paired with a red tie that matched the color of Ve’s hair, which Joss had helped him tie while saying, “It was about time you made up your mind, little brother.”
So everyone was there, waiting for Ve, who had wanted to stop by the restroom to touch up her makeup one last time. She made her appearance a few minutes later, wearing a simple black dress that fit her like second skin and a pair of sky-high heels because on that day, she felt grown-up and wanted to show it.
Before Ve could take another step, Alma threw herself into her arms to hug her, then did the same with her dad and sat down between Joss and Vik, leaving them no choice but to move aside to make room for her.
“There aren’t any flowers,” Alma murmured, her eyes scanning the room, which was far from meeting her requirements.
“Because they cost a fortune,” Joss explained with a smile.
“Mom keeps saying she earns more than Dad. She could have bought some,” Alma retorted, dangling her legs back and forth.
“Except flowers aren’t really your parents’ thing,” said Vik, casting an amused glance at Joss.
Alma seemed to find that a sufficient reason. Without saying another word, she then folded her hands in her lap, with a seriousness borrowed from the adults around her.
The ceremony was brief. The registrar said what needed to be said, the words of the contract, the recitation of the law that River already knew by heart, because the law, and then came the time to exchange vows.
“The wedding rings?” said the registrar.
“We don’t have wedding rings. We already have this,” Ve replied, reaching for the pendant she’d never taken off since River had slipped it into her pocket the day they’d said goodbye, almost a farewell, in a highway rest area parking lot. They’d talked about it a few days earlier, and to both of them, it was obvious that no wedding ring could be more meaningful than that.
“Good. In that case, you can exchange your vows.”
It was River who spoke first, finally able to say all the words he had carefully chosen and rehearsed in his head over the previous days to express his emotions, something that had never been his strong suit.
“These pendants belonged to my parents,” he began, glancing briefly at Ve’s before looking up into her eyes. “They gave them to each other on their wedding day. It’s all I have left of them. I’ve always worn my father’s and kept my mother’s in a box, because my sister and I didn’t know what else to do with it.”
At the back of the room, Joss mouthed silently, “They’d be so proud to see what you’ve done with them.”
“The day I realized what you meant to me, I gave it to you,” River continued. “It didn’t really go as planned, and I had to keep it a little longer, but I knew that one way or another, one day it would be yours.”
Ve said nothing. She just took River’s hands and let him speak.
“And the day I left you no choice but to accept it, you understood. Because you always understand me. It still took us a little while to find our way back to each other after that, but looking back now, I think that these pendants were always meant for the two of us, if one believes in such things.” He paused to enjoy Ve's smile, which was lighting up the room more and more. “Today, I believe in it. I love you, Ve. I don’t tell you that enough, I know, but today I need to tell it: I love you. And I promise to tell it more often.”
The silence that followed was the kind no one dared to break. No one except Alma.
“Why isn’t Dad crying? In movies, they both cry.”
“Shh…” said all the guests in unison.
“But…?” she insisted.
A second “shh” was the only answer she got, under the amused gazes of Ve and River.
Ve then spoke up. Unlike River, she hadn’t prepared anything, preferring to go with the flow and adapt to whatever he said. She had always been better at expressing her feelings than he was.
“You know, back then I kept that pendant because it was mostly a beautiful reminder of you, but without really understanding what it actually meant to you,” she said, a touch of embarrassment in her voice. “You’d explained it to me the first time you gave it to me, but given the situation, well, you know…”
“I know,” River confirmed in a voice that meant I forgive you.
“But over time, through our victories, but also our failures and mistakes that never managed to separate us, I realized that with this pendant you had given me a part of yourself, the one you protect the most and that you show to no one but me.” Ve felt her throat tighten but decided to ignore it. “But also all those parts of you that are too heavy to carry alone and that you agreed to share with me, taking on part of what was destroying me in exchange, and which, without you, would have eventually killed me. And that’s why I don’t need you to tell me you love me. Because your acts have always spoken for you. Because with everything it represents, all I need to do is feel this pendant around my neck to remember it. And I promise I’ll take care of it just as much as you've always taken care of me.”
River didn’t move. He simply looked at Ve with an expression that only she could read to understand what was truly going on inside him.
“I love you, River. In this life and in any other, it will always be you.”
River rested his forehead against Ve’s. They stayed that way, eyes closed and breathing peacefully, a rare occurrence for them, and the gathering remained silent for a moment. So much so that they suddenly felt that there was no one else in the world but the two of them.
It was the registrar who, glancing at his watch, cleared his throat before speaking. “Well then. I hereby declare you husband and wife. You may…”
“Is that it? Is this when you kiss?” Alma exclaimed.
“Cupcake…” Ve sighed under River’s tender gaze.
“What? That’s a real question,” Alma persisted, which provoked general laughter.
“Yes, sweetheart. This is when we kiss,” River concluded before grabbing Ve’s hands to pull her toward him and press his lips against hers.
- The End -