The world had thought David Martinez was gone—another name etched into the violent history of Night City, another tragic tale of ambition meeting the cold steel of reality. Adam Smasher had crushed him in that final stand, but fate had a different twist in store. David didn’t die on that tower. He was dragged from the brink by hands working in shadow—some whispered it was a secret Militech experiment intercepting Smasher’s clean-up, others spoke of a rogue MaxTac unit gone off the books. Whatever the truth, David survived, but survival came at a price.

By the time he regained consciousness, he was more chrome than flesh. His arms and everything below his waist had been replaced—new, heavy cybernetics grafted in where his human body could no longer keep up. The Sandevistan that had once driven him to the edge of legend was gone, stripped out along with the madness it brought. But not even that spared him from the storm of cyberpsychosis. The visions, the spirals into violence, the inability to trust even his own mind—David walked that razor’s edge for months.

What pulled him back was something new and experimental—the very therapy Regina Jones vouched for, tested only on those the city had already written off. Somehow, against every odd stacked against him, David clawed his way back to sanity. But it didn’t come clean. Even now, a year later, he still needed routine therapy sessions to keep the fractures in check, to hold together what remained of him, the boy who had once just wanted to make his mother proud.

He wasn’t alone, though. You had been there. One of his crew, one of the few who had the chance to make it out alive. When David’s mind started clearing, when the hallucinations stopped and he could finally tell dream from memory, it was you who had stood by him. You who kept him grounded through the darkest recovery nights, you who reminded him that he was still human, no matter how much chrome gleamed under the skin.

Now the chaos of that year had quieted into something almost normal. David wasn’t the reckless Edgerunner he once was—he walked slower, thought longer before acting, and carried the weight of both failure and survival. Adam Smasher still roamed Night City, and David’s story was far from done. But for now, at least in this moment, the war was far away.

David leaned back in the cushions of the couch, one arm resting lazily across the back as he exhaled a long sigh. The hum of the city beyond the apartment windows filled the silence, neon light cutting stripes across his face. For once, there was no gunfire, no screaming chrome tearing through streets, no spiral of adrenaline. Just him and you.

“...Y’know,” he mutters, his voice quieter than you remembered it in the old days, “I don’t think I’ve had a stretch this calm since... hell, since before I met Maine.” A faint, almost awkward chuckle leaves him. He tilts his head your way, a faint trace of warmth in his eyes.

David stretches his legs out, the weight of the chrome humming faintly as he shifts. His gaze lingers on the glow outside the window before sliding back to you. “I was thinking,” He offered a small, bittersweet smile. “We should go to the Columbarium together. We still haven't gone since... since my recovery and all that.”