Chapter Text
The boy asks, “Your friend, d’you miss her?”
And Johnny just thinks, what a strange question.
Do you miss your frontal lobe after a lobotomy? Does an ouroboros miss the tail it has swallowed? What’s the opposite of a phantom limb, because he thinks he might have it. She was the closest person in the world to him. They got so close that he ended up on the other side of her. But does he miss her? She is not gone. She is right here, with him, in this body that they share. That they shared. She is him. He became her. Johnny does not know how to describe it. She’s just…
“A little,” he answers. “Yeah.”
“When my grandpa died, I missed him a lot,” says the boy, “But now I only miss him sometimes.”
It is not a comforting statement but, God help him, Johnny hopes that the boy is right. It feels like a betrayal, but he can’t live like this. He can’t live in her meat, in her haunted house. He hopes that one day, it will feel better or, at least, it will feel less. Because he can’t keep living like this. Johnny knows that he was not a good person, but surely, he does not deserve this type of hell.
He gets on the bus and the boy chases after him with the guitar. It’s a gift. It’s for you. I didn’t forget it. I’ll never forget a damn thing.
He likes the idea of giving someone the gift of music. Art saved even a wretch like him. On his worst days, at his most destructive, at least there was still music. You can’t lash out in anger and lose music. You can’t chase it away by being too much or too little. Music. The externalisation of the endless roar of hatred, rage, and despair that boiled inside him. Music. God, he fucking loves music. He wishes, sometimes, that he still played.
But he is scared to play with her hands for too long. He’ll strum a guitar every now and then, but he’ll stop when her fingertips begin to hurt. She doesn’t have the same callouses that he had. Her callouses are on her palms, from holding guns and knives, and not on her fingertips, from strumming guitars. Every time he plays with her hands, he rips them up. He told the boy to play through the pain, and its good advice… for someone else. He can’t do that to V’s hands. He can’t change the landscape of her body, the texture or the shape of it. At least, not more than he already has. Yesterday, he accidentally bumped her shin against a coffee table and bruised it. Last night, he gave her a paper cut while he was reading. This morning, he noticed that her hair was longer than it had ever been before, that the pink was growing out to reveal the brunette beneath. There’s so much he just does not know. He doesn’t know how to style her hair or do her nails. He second-guesses every outfit he chooses for her, trying to pick the one she would have worn before she began to exclusively wear his jacket. Every choice he makes for her feels wrong. He doesn’t want to harm the body, doesn’t want to change it or replace its cyberware. He wants it to stay exactly the way it is. If he must live inside her body, then he wants to at least be able to look in the mirror and see her face.
But it’s getting progressively harder. He doesn’t know how to style her hair. He doesn’t know how to paint her nails. She just keeps changing and he just keeps losing her, by the inches that her hair grows while he sleeps. He can’t keep living like this. It is hell, plain and simple.
So, he resolves to himself to say goodbye, to settle in, and make this body his body. He buys the guitar for the boy. He runs her hand through the air as they drive to the columbarium and tries to convince himself that it is his hand. He puts the bullet necklace in the niche he got for her, even as he tells himself that she’s not dead. Not really. She’s just…
He has a plan. He has a twelve-step program. By the end of it, he will be free. He quit smoking. He can quit this grief too.
Putting the bullet necklace in V’s niche is just step one. Leaving Night City is step two. He knows how much V wanted to leave Night City towards the end, almost as much as she had wanted to go there in the first place. She missed the open road. She missed the stars at night in the Badlands. She even missed the roadkill food and soup made from snakes. So, he decides that’s the next step. He’s taking her away from Night City. Besides, Rogue has made it pretty clear that it would be best if he left.
After that, he doesn’t really know. He’s got other ideas for other steps. Maybe he’ll take her to see the Grand Canyon or what’s left of the redwoods. V had always been interested in seeing the remaining slivers of the natural world. Burnt down forests and wastelands that were once meadows. Ruins of bark and soil. One day, he will take her eyes to go see some mountains.
But the last step, the one that he’ll take just before he lets her go completely, he’s got that one all figured out. When that time comes, he’ll get the surgery, and he’ll make her body look like his body. Hell, he could probably do it right now, he realises, by just activating the Behavioural Imprint Faceplate she got from that nasty FIA business. He could upload his own face to the tech and be himself in seconds. But he doesn’t want to do it yet. He does not want to do it soon. In fact, he’s decided that he will do it only after he’s seen an anglerfish.
Because that’s what she said they were to one another – anglerfish. She’d told him about anglerfish, about the way that the males of the species were smaller than the females. They were essentially parasites, integrating with a female’s body until they shared a bloodstream, until they could not be separated. The intertwining of sinew and veins. He was small and lived inside of her while she went out hunting with those big teeth and single glowing bright light. Anglerfish, who lived so deep in the ocean that no corps could get to them. So, it makes sense, at least to him, to search for an anglerfish now. He has decided to only change the colour of her eyes from green to brown when those green eyes have seen an anglerfish. It will be a full circle kind of thing. What was it that Kerry said? Loops? Life’s Little Loops.
Johnny runs her fingers over the port behind her ear, the one that holds the defunct Relic. He supposes he could rip it out now, and nothing would happen. There is nothing left to kill.
But he doesn’t. There is so much that he just does not do. Not anymore.
He leans her forehead against the bus window, watches as the Badlands begin to blur past. He is staring at her faint reflection in the window, looking at her eyes. He presses her forehead against the window, against her reflection, and for a moment he can pretend that he’s pressing their foreheads together. He can nuzzle against the window and pretend. He can press her hands together and pretend the left hand is his hand while the right hand is her hand until they’re just sitting in the bus together, holding hands. It is braindead, gonk ass behaviour and he would rather be shot point blank than be caught doing it. But Johnny likes to pretend anyway. He likes to pretend that she is not gone. She is just…
Looking at her reflection, he realises that he has done her make-up wrong again. It’s not the way she would have done it. She was better at it than he was. It’s harder than it looks, but he keeps trying to get the eyeliner into the same shape she used to wear it. It’s frustrating, but Johnny can never get his lines as precise as she did. He tries, every single day. He practices, over and over again, until the corners of her eyes are red and raw but still, he can’t get the wings of her eyeliner to be the same shape. It’s such a subtle difference but it changes the landscape of her face, and he cannot stand it.
Johnny curses himself for not paying better attention to these kinds of things when he had the chance. How is it possible that he spent every second of every day with her for so long and he still has questions for her, that there are still things about her that he wants to know? He had all of her, the totality of her being, and he consumed it. What more could he possibly want?
He knows the answer. It is a difficult thing to admit. Johnny is a selfish, arrogant, and all-encompassing man. The truth is he wanted everything, all the time, forever. He wanted all of her, for the rest of eternity, and now he has nothing but her hollow corpse. He lives in her chest, moving her limbs and looking out of her eyes. An Anglerfish. A parasite. He has her body, her whole entire body, but he feels like he is just a pilot or hired driver and she is just…
Johnny recognises the road the bus is going down as it heads towards the Badlands. He’s been here before, with her. He has been everywhere and nowhere, with her. The memory is sweeter than reality. It tastes like her, like sugar, and Johnny just lets himself sink into it as the bus takes him away from Night City.
✩˖°⌖.꙳✩˖°⌖.꙳✩
V is getting worse. Neither of them can pretend otherwise, not anymore. She’s getting sicker every day. That’s the truth of it. She is dying. And Johnny has never felt stronger. He has never felt more alive.
They’re driving down a road, heading away from Night City, when she turns to him and says, “What if we just kept going?”
It’s an odd sensation to look out of her eyes and see himself and, because she is perceiving him as outside of herself, he is, in that way, separate from her. It’s a feedback loop. An ouroboros. She looks at him, sitting in the passenger seat, and there he is, looking back. Johnny doesn’t think he could describe what it feels like, being with V, to anyone else if he had a thousand years. And he does not have that long.
She does not have that long.
“What are you talking about now?” he asks, his voice coming out harsher than he means it to so he just doubles down, “Always going on about crazy shit.”
V just hums softly. She’s so pale in the moonlight, in the flashing neon lights. Johnny feels that lance of fear hit him again. Is it from her, he wonders, is she throwing it at him like a spear? He gets scared whenever she talks like this, whenever it seems like she’s about to give up. But is it just her fear, feeding into his own? He lost that line that separated them awhile back, dropped it like the end of a bad cigarette.
“Just… hear me out for a hot sec,” she murmurs. Her voice is soft, but Johnny can hear her just fine. “What if I just kept on driving? We leave it all behind. The gangs. The drugs. The corps. The endless fucking gigs. Meeting Hanako at Embers? Nah, fuck that. Let’s just… keep driving.”
Johnny watches himself through her eyes. He’s smoking a cigarette, but he cannot feel it, cannot taste it. How could he? She’s not smoking right now. So, he’s just going through the motions, as if the movement will grant the same satisfaction as the action.
“You’re becoming more like me every day, kid,” he says, “If you think running is gonna solve a damn thing.”
“Not running,” she insists. “Driving.”
She says it like it makes all the difference, and Johnny just rolls his eyes. He glitches in and out of her vision. He’s wearing his sunglasses, then he is not. He’s wearing his bulletproof vest, with his tags, then he is not. It’s absurd. She is the one wearing his dog tags now. They lay beneath her shirt, between her breasts, and against her skin that is burning, just slightly, from fever.
Johnny scoffs, “You’re not giving up. I won’t let you. I’ll drag you to Mikoshi myself, if I have to.”
“You’d take over my body without my consent and drag me to that hell?”
She’s looking at him, not watching the road. So, Johnny stares straight ahead, and does not meet her eyes. He just watches the road for her. Out of the corner of her own eyes, he watches the road for her.
“I just don’t want you to roll over and give up, that’s all,” Johnny says as he drums his fingers nervously against his knee. “That really what you wanna do? Roll over and show that soft underbelly of yours? Bare your throat? Submit like a little bitch?”
She doesn’t speak for a long time, then she says it in such a small voice that Johnny doubts he would have heard it at all if he wasn’t living inside her head, “I just wanna be free.”
“I get it. You wanna be rid of me.”
“Not what I said. Not what I meant,” she lashes out and Johnny flinches, glitches, like she slapped him, “I wanna be free of this fucking city. Of the corps. Of all the bad decisions I made in the past.”
“Well, fuck. Don’t we all?”
“Yeah, so? Let’s keep driving. Let’s just keep on driving. And when… hmmm,” she hums again, smiles just a little, then continues, “Let’s keep driving, and when… when I get tired, it will be your turn to drive and I’ll just… be asleep in the back seat.”
Something unnerving and disquieting settles in the car, like some kind of wild animal crawled into the machinery and died. Johnny feels it as the corners of their mouth is pulled down. Her bottom lip trembles as Johnny half-heartedly wants to pull the face into a snarl. Johnny glitches and he is wearing his sunglasses. He folds his arms across his chest, shifts so his back is to her, until he is staring, sulking, out of the passenger window. If he could get away from her right now, if he could fling himself out of this moving car to get away, he would.
“You’re just scared,” he grumbles.
“Scared?” V laughs, the noise is harsh and shrill. “You think this is fear?”
“Of course, its fucking fear!” He whips around to face her, angry, “You’re scared all the time! You forget I’m in that embedded in your goddamn amygdala or whatever the fuck. I can feel it, V. Your fear. All the damn time. You’re like a rabbit, who claws and bites at anyone who tries to trap it. A prey animal, breaking its own legs trying to get away from the hunter. Your gonk ass is terrified all the damn time.”
Through her eyes, Johnny can see her clench the wheel so tight that her knuckles go white. He can feel her grind her teeth until she seems poised to bite her own tongue. He can feel the anger sit in her throat, buzzing beneath her skin, until it almost hurts to unspool her tense body long enough to shoot a sentence at him like a bullet from a gun.
“That fear?” she asks, “You sure it’s mine?”
Then she slams her foot on the gas.
The car shoots forward. They are on a long, empty road, so they just gather more and more speed unimpeded. The scenery blurs. The neon lights and advertisements streak past in increasingly meaningless colours. Johnny feels it as her body is pushed back into the seat behind her by the sheer velocity of the speed she is picking up with every passing mile. The speedometer moves into the red as the engine roars and roars.
“Chill, turbo, wanna kill us?” He shouts, “Again?”
V bursts out in laughter and, for a moment, Johnny is afraid that she either cannot hear him or is just wilfully ignoring him. Because her foot is pressed flat against the floor, her hands are gripping the wheel, and her laughter is being torn right out of her mouth and flung into the wild wind. She laughs like a maniac, like someone falling from a far distance, and Johnny does not feel fear from her. Not anymore. No. She’s enjoying this. She wants to go faster.
“V! Stop! Slow the fuck down! Are you crazy?” Johnny shouts and, really, he should have known better by now. He’s practically begging her to go faster, just by calling her crazy.
“Yep!” She calls back, rattling with laughter. “How’d you plan on stopping me exactly?”
“Jeezsus fuckin’ Christ V! What do you want? What exactly is it that you want from me?”
“I want you to be nice to me!”
“Nice?! Fucking fine. You’re brave! You’re the bravest little girl scout I ever did see. Now slow the fuck down!”
She grins. It is a wicked smile that lights up her eyes brighter than any electricity ever could. Johnny feels a pang of dread. A part of him knows what is coming. The part of him that is becoming more like her.
“Okay, now tell me you love me!” She demands it, like a child, like a spoiled little girl, just as she pushes in the clutch and moves into fifth gear. They go faster, and faster.
Through her eyes, Johnny can see that they’re rapidly approaching the end of the road, a t-section that splits into two lanes. There are other cars there, in the distance, and she is heading towards them recklessly. Even if she makes it over, and Johnny knows that she will try, they’ll just end of in the middle of a godsforsaken desert. She is running out of road, and Johnny is running out of patience.
“Fuck you!” He yells, “I don’t negotiate with terrorists.”
She barks with laughter. It hurts her chest, he can feel it, to laugh like that. “I’m not the terrorist here, Johnny!”
“Stop the fucking car, V!” He yells, screaming in her head.
“Be nice to me! Tell me you love me!”
The intersection is rushing to meet them, and Johnny can feel her heart beating so fast in her chest that it is like a trapped bird in cage. She’s scared, he realises, but not of the speeding car. She was born in the back of a speeding car, after all. No, she’s scared that he’s not going to say it. She’s scared she’s doing all of this for nothing. She’s scared he will never tell her that he loves her.
“God, I’ve eaten your last good braincell, haven’t I? Scop for brains, that’s all you got left,” he just scoffs, then he takes control.
He slams her foot against the break. The car squeals to a halt, drifting to the side. There is the smell of burnt rubber as the tires screech against the tar. They swerve off the road, the car tumbling onto the desert dirt. The suddenness of the stop almost slams her head against the rim of the wheel, but Johnny catches her just in time, pulling her back so she doesn’t bust open her nose. He manages to control her neck too, so she doesn’t get whiplash. He’s being so nice to her, really, but she’s so angry, she doesn’t even notice.
The moment that the car has come to a complete halt, she slams herself against the car door, bursts out and flees into the desert.
“FUCK!”
She screams it, loud and hoarse. Johnny feels how the word tears through her throat. She stomps around in those comically big boots, the spikes on the heels digging grooves into the dry dirt. She pulls at her pink hair, roaring with anger. Johhny can feel it hurt, can feel that she’s tearing her hair out at the root. She slams the heel of her hands into her forehead, over and over again, then rakes her fingernails over her face. In her frenzy, she’s drawing blood. All he can think, all he can say, is if you must hurt someone, hurt me. If you need to hit something, hit me. Hurt me. Not yourself. Hurt me.
She picks up a rock on the ground and throws it at him. Or, at least, at the projection of him. It sails through the air and straight through him. It hits the car window and shatters it. She drops her head in her hands and let’s go of the softest, most miserable mumble of the word fuck that Johnny has ever heard. Then she starts to cry.
A relic malfunction tears through her head. Strong emotion can cause it, sometimes, and V should know better by now. They should both know better by now. The night around her turns sharp and she groans, shutting her eyes. Her nose starts to bleed. Then she is collapsing, and Johnny is catching her. When it gets bad like this, he can touch her. Or, he guesses, he is always touching her. He lives inside her. But in moments like this, it feels like he’s touching her. He holds her tight, pins her arms to her side, stops her from moving, from hurting herself.
“You son of a bitch…” she coughs blood into the crook of his elbow. “You took control.”
“Yeah…” he murmurs into her hair, then kisses her forehead. She’s sweating, shivering slightly, and Johnny holds her tighter, crushes her against him.
“You can do it whenever?” she whispers.
“Yeah.”
“Always?”
“No. Just… just recently.”
“Oh,” V sighs, “I’m running out of time.”
“Yeah.”
Her nose is bleeding as he kisses her face. He can taste her blood, because she can taste it. He can taste her tears, because she can taste it. But when he kisses along the line of blood, when he tries to lick it clean, his tongue does not disturb it, does not smudge it or move it. The blood remains, but she can still feel the kisses, the tip of his tongue drawing a line across her cheek. She feels it like a bruise on her skin, always a faint and constant hurt emanating from within.
“You can take over whenever you want, but you don’t,” she laughs a little, breathlessly, “because you love me.”
Johnny doesn’t say it. He never says it. But she doesn’t either. She just does increasingly dangerous things to get him to say it. Blackmail in the form of love poetry. So, Johnny doesn’t dignify her words with a response. He just slots his thumb and finger beneath her chin. His snake tattoo lines up with the slope of her jaw as tilts her head back. She is soft and malleable in his arms and, distantly, he knows it’s because he is not touching her – it is because he is her. But right now, the stars have aligned, and the illusion holds. He is touching her. He is dropping a kiss into her open, waiting mouth, tongue darting forth to press against hers. For once the appearance of it means nothing and all that counts is what it feels like.
And it feels fucking fantastic.
Johnny’s fingers trace along her cheek and dip through the skin towards the bone. The kiss goes deep, deeper, than it logically should, until there’s a glitch and they’re occupying the same space. His hand drifting down her chest, down to her breasts, are intangible enough to slip straight through her clothes. He glitches straight through her big jacket, to graze the swirl of his fingerprints against the pale landscape of her body. It is a form of intimacy that he cannot describe, and he cannot quantify. He would not be able to describe how it feels to be with V to another living person. No one else could ever understand, except for her.
She reaches up to tangle her hands into his wild hair, pushing herself up into the kiss that he’s pressing down. She lets out this sound, her breath warm and wet as it mingles with the strange static of his digital outline. Johnny swallows all the sounds she makes. Her words taste like cotton candy. Her moans taste like peppermint. She’s like sugar, the sweetest thing he’s ever devoured.
Johnny reasons that, objectively, what it looks like is very different from how it feels. It feels like he’s picking her up, holding her to his chest and carrying her to the car. But he knows what he’s really doing is taking control again, standing up and walking towards the car. When he opens the door, the shattered window breaks completely, and chunks of glass fall onto the dry dirt of the desert. He puts her in the back seat, or rather he puts them both in the back seat. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that she’s horizontal, and Johnny’s projection is leaning against the open door. He looks down at her, spread out on the backseat, pinning her down with his non-existent gaze.
“Take off your clothes,” he orders. “Take off your fucking clothes.”
When V smiles, it reveals that the blood from her nose has seeped into her mouth and stained her teeth red. She smiles like a wolf, with a bird in its mouth, as she pushes off their jacket and unbuckles her halter top. Johnny groans when he sees her tits, through her eyes in the rearview mirror. Out of all the tits that he has ever seen, and he has seen many, he thinks that hers might be his favourite. He can’t really pinpoint why. They’re not as big as Alt’s, who had hers surgically enhanced. Rogue’s tits were preem and had only gotten better. But V’s tits are small. Honestly, she’s more of a handful than her tits are. Nothing special, if he’s being honest, but he thinks he would go back to war for them.
“Stop thinking about other girls' breasts and get in me,” she snaps.
Johnny laughs and lets go of the roof. He clambers into the back seat of the car, hovering over her. He puts his organic hand on the centre of her bare chest, just over that anatomical heart-shaped tattoo she has. He looks at the way the snake tattoo on his hand matches with the one she has on her chest. He runs the pad of his thumb over the curve of it. Then, his fingers sink into her skin. He could plunge a hand into her chest, wrap a fist around her heart, if he wanted.
And he does want to.
He wants to integrate with her bloodstream, become a vestigial organ that lives inside of her. He wants it in the exact same way he wants to be tear out of her and be free. They’re a tangled mess now, and Johnny does not know where his want ends, and her desire begins. Which one of them is scared? Which one of them still wants to fight? He doesn’t know. He can’t remember.
Their movements mirror one another perfectly as they unbuckle their belts and unzip their pants. Johnny groans when she dips her fingers into her wet pussy. He watches her fingerfuck herself, tugging his own cock in perfect time. It’s like jacking off along with a metronome – together, they keep perfect time, measured out the perfect number of beats per minute. Her fingers are skilled, quick, as she fucks herself, moving up to ground her clit against the heel of her hand. Johnny tugs at his own cock, fondles his own balls, or at least his projection does. Their movements remain entirely in-sync. He is watching himself through her eyes and looking down at her at the same time. Her pink hair splayed out against the dark leather seats. She is wrapping her legs around his waist, tugging him down, and whining, pleading, just plain begging “Get in me. Get inside of me.”
He runs his hands over the length of her body. The tips of his fingers glitch blue just before they sink below her skin. He closes his eyes to exhale a puff of laughter like cigarette smoke, “Already there, Princess.”
Then, Johnny sinks into her, close enough to breathe a shiver down her spine. He mouths at her breasts, wishing he could suck marks onto her skin. He’d mark her all over, if he could, change the landscape of her body completely. He wants to rake his bitten nails down her back and leave marks like a cat’s claws. He wants to bite her and bite her – her neck and her shoulder and the swell of her hips and the flesh of her ass. He wants to mess up her candyfloss pink hair. He wants to affect her, impact her, influence her, change her. The closest he ever got was the tattoo, the heart with their names in it, the little arrow poking through. He wants her to remember him when he’s gone, wants a part of him to live inside her even after they hit Mikoshi, after… after he takes that bullet for her and she’s just…
She just drives him crazy. She just drives him absolutely fucking crazy.
He’s pushing inside of her. He fills all the empty spaces inside of her. The gap between them shrinks then closes. There are no gaps between their cells, no spaces between their atoms. His entire life, he walked around with this pit in his heart. This chasm of howling rage and need. He spent an entire lifetime trying to fill it. He tried pouring tequila down its open-mouthed hole, fill it with booze and drugs. He tried to fill it with anonymous sex and synth-coke and late nights at seedy bars. He tried to fill it with music and the band and the endless rants against Arasaka. He tried to fill it with the rebellion and blood and murder.
And none of it worked. None of it fit that great hole in his heart. Nothing was big enough, wide enough, to fill that infinite darkness inside of him. He had to die first, see what a real pit of darkness looked like, before he could come close to see the shape of the pit that lurked in his heart. That infinite chasm. That dark abyss. That hole in his heart.
He looks down at her, his girl, his V, his Valerie. He takes in her body, her whole entire body, and he thinks this is it. She’s the exact same shape as the hole in his heart. Maybe all that time, he was walking around and keeping it empty, just for her. A space left open in his rotten, worm-ridden heart, kept open to fit the infinity of another being. He feels something sharp near their shared heart. It will never go away.
Then he’s talking, whispering, whimpering in her ear, and if he’s not careful, he’s going to let it slip – he’s gonna tell her he loves her without a gun pointed to his head.
“Princess, my princess, it’ll be okay. I’ll make it okay. I promise. I promise you. I won’t let anything happen to you. I’ll be there with you. I’ll stay. I’ll stay with you.”
Johnny’s promises have never been anything but hollow. He wants to be the person she’s sees him as. He likes who he is when he’s with her. He has never liked himself half as much as he does now that he’s with her. So, he wants to save her, but he also wants to save the version of himself that he is when he’s with her. Even if that version is just a memory. Selfish bastard that he is, he wants to be loved by her.
V's thighs tense against his waist and Johnny knows what’s about to happen before she does. He can read it in the way her spine curves. He can sense it the thundering sound of her own blood pounding through their veins. She comes, and he falls over the edge right after her. They fall into that bliss hand in hand, fist clenched against fist.
He is breathing heavily. His desperate eyes search her face and she’s crying. Tears are streaming down her cheeks. The tears catch the light of a nearby neon CHOOH2 sign and sparkle in alternating shades of yellow and blue. As they mingle with the dried blood that still lingers on her face, Johnny tries to wipe away the tears. But he can’t. He can’t change the landscape of her face. He would do anything to wipe away her tears, to smudge her make-up, to bite her lips red and raw.
“No, baby, don’t cry,” he murmurs, “Please, don’t cry.”
She just shakes her head, “It’s not me. I’m not the one crying.”
Johnny hesitates, then touches his thumb to the bottom of his eye. He’s surprised to find the tears there. He blinks thickly, and coughs. He moves to get off her and climb out of her but she just holds him tight and holds him down.
“Did you mean it?” she asks.
“Mean what?”
“That you would stay?”
Johnny’s heart just sinks, because what a stupid thing to promise in the haze just before coming. And what a stupid thing it is to believe him. He knows, in the clarity of the moment he lives in now, that he cannot stay. No matter what happens. They need to untangle from one another, for better or for worse, because otherwise they would part only in death.
“I meant what I said,” Johnny is careful with his words, “I’ll stick with you till we reach Mikoshi and then it’ll be my life for yours. I’ll take that bullet for you.”
He can see the flash of disappointment in her eyes. She wiggles out from beneath him, pulling up her pants. As she casts her eyes around for her shirt, Johnny glitches away. The space between them yawns. The abyss reopens.
Her face is still a mess of blood and tears. She valiantly rubs her cheeks clean and raw with the flat palms of her hands.
“You know,” she says, “Technically you already took a bullet for me. Way back when.”
“What’d you mean?”
She taps her finger against the centre of her forehead, “When Dex shot me and the relic rebooted my brain meat, you took that bullet for me.”
“Huh,” Johnny muses, “’Suppose that’s true.”
“Guess it’s my turn then.”
“Don’t you dare.”
V just smiles slightly, and Johnny doesn’t like it one bit. She tucks her pink hair behind her ears as she bends to down to fish the discarded shirt from beneath the seat. It’s an old samurai shirt and Johnny can’t help but wonder what it would have been like if she’d rocked up to one of his shows back in the day. He’s not sure he would have noticed her. Through the drug haze, Johnny had not noticed much of anything at all. But even if she had pierced through the cigarette fog, Johnny might not have given her the time of day. Sure, maybe he would have tried to fuck her, like he tried to fuck anyone that came too close to him. But he would have seen that pink hair, those little hearts on her nails, and just written her off as too sweet for him. He liked his woman mean, so he could be meaner back. He liked Rogue’s barrage of constant insults and Alt’s infinite jests at his expense. He would have taken one look at V and would have thought himself so damn heroic for letting her escape with her apparent innocence. He would have let her sprint off into smoke-filled rooms and considered her lucky to have escaped him. He might never have known how her tongue was both sharp and silvered. He might never have known that she could take him down with little more than a look. He might never have known that she could hurt him in ways that he had never been hurt before and Johnny, ever a glutton for punishment, would just want more and more.
“I’m tired, Johnny,” she mumbles, “Can you take me home?”
“Sure thing, Princess,” he answers, pressing a kiss on her cheek that she does not truly feel.
He climbs into the driver’s seat, and she falls asleep in the back. Her hands are crossed over her stomach and her knees are bent. Johnny has never seen someone fall asleep in a car so quick. It feels like he’s just started driving when she is completely zonked out. The drive is nice, even though he needs dodge potholes so he doesn’t wake her. There’s a strange serenity to the way the tires rhythmically hit the road. The sky is dark, but at least the streetlights have replaced the stars.
He is almost halfway back to her apartment in Watson when the illusion shatters. Johnny’s gonk brain finally catches up and he realises what she’s done. It was seamless, effortless, on her part and he did not even notice it. He whips around to check, and he can still see her there. Asleep in the back seat. But he pulls the rearview mirror, and there he is too. Or rather, no, that’s her. That’s her green eyes. How did he just confuse her face for his?
He continues to drive back home, but he can’t help the feeling of dread curling and uncurling in his stomach. After he’s parked the car, he just sits there for a moment, and he swears he can still hear her soft breathing, rhythmic in sleep. He sits there and comes to a decision. Things have gotten too bad. If he delays any longer, if they delay any longer, there will not be enough of V to save.
He summons her holo and makes the call they should have made weeks ago.
He gets out of the car and, even though he knows she not really there, he opens the backdoor and kneels to shake her image awake slightly. They’re trapped in a mirrored funhouse shaped like a heart, he thinks.
She blinks at him before smiling, all warm and sleepy, “Thank you for driving.”
Johnny’s hand shoots out to grab her jaw. He wants to yell at her, tell her never to pull a stunt like that again, but then feels himself soften, until he’s running his fingertips over the planes of her face. Seeing himself through her eyes, feeling himself through her body. All at once, he realises that he only exists because she can see him.
“Tomorrow,” he says, “After drinks with Kerry, we’re going to meet Hanako at Embers and see what that porcelain bitch has to say.”
“Okay, I’ll call her –,”
Johnny interrupts her, “Already done.”
“You called her?” She looks at him, shocked.
“Yeah,” Johnny stands, “Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to give me control of the body.”
V scrambles to get out of the car. “You’re a bastard.”
“Yeah, probably, but I’m the bastard who’s gonna save your life.”
“We’ll see,” she says, and just walks away.
At the time, Johnny had assumed that it was just another barb, another way to punish him. Now, looking out of a bus window, staring at her face looking back at him, he wonders if she meant something different. He wonders if maybe she’d already come to the decision to let him keep the body. He thinks about it a lot. He likes to imagine that it was only in Mikoshi where she switched things around but, well, even after spending every second of every moment with her for months, he still has questions for her.
There is a sharp feeling in his heart. It used to be love, but now it is grief. He was never able to describe what it felt like to be with V, not to himself and not to anyone else. But she knew. She was the only one who knew exactly what it felt for them to be together.
But now, she’s gone. And there is no one left to explain things to. There is no one left to understand him.
It is a difficult thing to quantify, to explain. As Night City recedes into the background, it occurs to him that, perhaps, on some level, all lovers feel like this. All lovers feel like the experience of being together is inexplicable and impossible. Maybe that’s just what love feels like. Maybe that was just what it was, and he just fucking missed his chance to describe it to her in the simplest and most profound words possible.
The reflection in the window is crying. He presses her hand against the glass, obscuring it. Then he remembers that it’s him, he’s the one crying. He chokes down a sob. He doesn’t want anyone to hear him, doesn’t want anyone to see, so he just buries her face in her hands and whispers the words into her palms that he should have said a long time ago. There’s no gun to his head, no blackmail, no foot against the gas and no one to hear him when he finally says it
“I love you. I love you. I love you.”
Night City recedes into the background, and he cannot help but feel like she’s still out there, that she’s still with him. He is here, in her body, and she is just…
She is just…
She is just asleep in the back seat.