Chapter Text
The first three stations she flips to are all playing Eurodyne tracks, and V can feel amused annoyance from Johnny prickle somewhere within her as she speeds on her motorcycle up through the familiar streets of Heywood and back towards Watson. The third one they land on is actually her personal favorite song of Eurodyne's, so she leaves it on for a moment, and she feels Johnny’s… whatever it is he’s feeling about his former bandmate's solo hits soften into something almost like… begrudging admiration? It is an undeniable banger, that’s for sure.
She flips the station again and Us Cracks blares in their ears. She grins and guns her bike, weaving between the rush hour traffic as they cross into Corpo Plaza.
She expects to feel more annoyance from Johnny at the sudden auditory onslaught of the lazrpop track, but instead he seems to be curious, even a little intrigued, though he still doesn’t say anything. She’s noticed he usually leaves her alone when she’s riding her motorcycle, and given the way she drives, she can’t entirely blame him considering he’s getting just as flatlined as she does if they crash. She sighs and flips the station again, determined to get a rise out of him. And this time, it’s a Samurai song, one she knows well enough that she almost considered getting the lyrics tattooed on her back when she was a teenager. Thank god I didn’t, she thinks, burying the thought before Johnny can catch it. She hopes.
Instead, she begins singing along loudly, making up her own nonsense lyrics instead of the actual ones. They cross the bridge into Watson, the sun setting to their left.
“Blah blah bloop down the rebel path, chip chip chip, I’m chippin’ in,” V sings along to the radio as she skids her motorcycle to a stop in her parking garage, her face a wolfish, teasing grin.
“Oh shut the fuck up, V, stop pretending you don’t know the words.”
Johnny finally takes the bait, appearing in front of her bike, leaning against the handlebars. They've been at each other's throats all day, but it's settled into a playful, comfortable banter, and she knows on some level they're both enjoying swapping insults with someone else who can actually dish them out as well as the other can. His mean smirk is twitching upwards at the corner even now, which only makes her grin wider as she kills the the engine, cutting off Johnny's song with a glitchy thunk. But she doesn't miss a beat and continues singing her increasingly ridiculous made-up lyrics as she vaults off her bike in one swift movement and saunters theatrically towards the elevator.
She collapses laughing against the wall of the elevator, and Johnny's glitching form emerges with static crackle in front of her. Their eyes meet, and he is laughing too, but then it’s suddenly too intimate and he looks away and puts his sunglasses back on and, after a moment, glitches away again. She understands why. These easy moments between them, when their banter suddenly syncs into an effortless rhythm, are what truly scare her the most. Because in these moments, she can feel the line between the two of them blur, and she can feel the edges of his mind touching hers, enveloping hers, and the scariest thing about it is that it feels so… familiar, and safe, like something that’s always been a part of her, something she’s always known and just somehow forgotten. His memories, his impulses, his preferences, his desires unfurl inside of her like a lost limb that’s slowly regaining sensation. Like she can’t remember where she ends and he begins. And that's exactly why it's terrifying; it’s the fucking horrifying reality of experiencing her brain getting slowly and inexorably rearranged into someone else’s. There is a foreign mind in her head, in her body, and she can already start to viscerally feel her identity slipping away, being subsumed by his. The process, if left unchecked, is going to kill her and leave this long-dead stranger in control of the remaining husk of her body as the malfunctioning Relic she stole does its work from where it sits permanently lodged in the nape of her neck. Arasaka's new toy is slowly killing her. Johnny's presence in her mind, regardless of how either of them feels about it, is slowly and inevitably killing her. That’s just the facts.
So, better to keep the walls up. Carve out and cling to what little space they can, to hide from each other whatever little they still can. To hold on for dear life to those last bastions of privacy in their own minds - or rather, in the single mind and body they’re forced to share.
My body, V thinks. It’s still mine.
It’s a loud and forceful thought, and she can feel Johnny react to it, but she can’t tell exactly what it is he’s feeling. He’s put up his walls and retreated inside her mind again, and the warm, safe, yet terrifyingly dangerous feeling has receded with him.
She shivers, suddenly cold as the elevator rattles its way up to her apartment level. It was almost 100 degrees out today, so she didn’t bring a coat when she left her place this morning, just her small bag slung across her back and her pistol holster. She got caught in a flash rain shower out in the Badlands chasing one of the rogue Delamains on her motorcycle earlier, and then got dust kicked all over her on the way back. By the time they got to the last of the wayward AI-powered cabs in that underpass in Pacifica, Johnny'd been teasing her that she fit right in with the bums there as she cleaned up a nearby crime scene she’d intercepted on her NCPD scanner.
“If you’re done beating up every thug in Pacifica like a pinata on the off chance that one of them will somehow magically lead you to the Voodoo Boys, let’s get the fuck home so you can take a fucking shower, put on a your best ‘I’m hot shit’ outfit, and get your ass to the Afterlife to ask Rogue to help you find Hellman,” he'd finally said to her, exasperated.
"You think she'll talk to me after what happened with Dex?"
"Rogue's a great judge of character," he'd assured her. "Just let her feel you out, see what your deal is."
"Great fucking plan, Johnny. I just, what, burst into her little VIP booth and ask for her help?"
"Pretty much, yup," he'd replied. “She’s a fixer, that’s literally her fuckin’ job.”
He was right, she'd decided then. She doesn’t know what the fuck she's doing. It’s not like wandering around the boardwalk answering random NCPD calls is going to endear her to the local gangs, or get her ear to the ground in any meaningful way. She is better off asking Rogue about Hellman and abandoning the Voodoo Boys lead for now - fuck, Rogue probably even has contacts in Pacifica, for all she knows. Johnny was right - she should go to the Afterlife.
And so here she is - here they are - stepping into her apartment and kicking off her muddy boots and slinging her bag off over her head and unhooking her pistol holster and pulling off her beanie and shaking out her thick, messy hair.
She avoids looking in the mirror as she undresses and steps into the shower. The water cascades over her body, slowly but surely unknotting the day’s work. Somewhere inside of her, she can feel Johnny enjoying it too.
It is still strange beyond words, having a constant presence there for every single minute of her day. Never being truly alone, with her body or her mind. Someone constantly there observing - judging, even - her every absent-minded fidget, her aches and pains, her strange little tics, each and every one of her quirks. He’d been a complete stranger to her only a few short weeks ago - Johnny Silverhand, a name she'd known only as the frontman of Samurai and a curse uttered by corpos, a face she'd grown up seeing on band posters and in history books as the terrorist who died blowing up Arasaka Tower almost 50 years ago. Someone she’d known only through his growling, rage-filled lyrics and via fringe conspiracy theories from washed up old rocker fucks. And yet, the forced intimacy of their situation has very quickly catapulted them into completely uncharted territory. And the projection of him that she sees - or hallucination, or whatever the fuck he is when he appears - looks so real, so tangible, despite the glitching blue artifacts that hover around his tall, lanky form. Like she could almost reach out and touch him.
She can't, though. Thank god. Not since that first night he appeared to her, when she awoke to his projection standing over her bed, her body still bound in bandages and her head still healing from the bullet she took from Dex. When Johnny, as confused and terrified as she was, tried to take control of her body - and how, failing that, he dragged her by her hair and hit her across the face and slammed her head into her window over and over, his panic and disorientation and claustrophobia overlapping with her own rage and terror into a screeching crescendo that left her despondent for days.
Since then, her hand thankfully goes straight through him like a fuckin' poltergeist.
Even now, it sometimes doesn't seem quite real, how Jackie's final act of desperation as his life left him - how he reached across the backseat of that Delamain, blood pouring from his face, and slotted the stolen biochip into her skull with his dying breath, still believing she could finish the job - has led to her having to quickly adjust to the inescapable reality of being passively observed by Johnny fuckin' Silverhand during all of her waking (and sleeping) hours.
She finishes showering and begins drying her hair, not bothering to cover herself. As she watches herself in the mirror, she feels Johnny watching her too, through her own eyes. She's never even attempted any kind of modesty around him, since it seems to her like doing so would only call more attention to her complete lack of ability to set any actual, meaningful boundaries between them, when push comes to shove. And she isn’t the type to pretend something just to make herself feel better. Which is also why she hasn’t been taking the blockers that Vik gave her, despite their violent and terrifying introduction. Having a foreign presence in her head was incomprehensible to her at first and it still is; the horrifying sensation of her mind and body being pried open and laid completely bare to a complete fucking stranger has been violating in a fundamental way that she and Johnny are both still struggling to grapple with and adapt to. But the moment she realized that she couldn't deny with absolute certainty that his engram truly is anything other than a whole entire actual person, with thoughts and memories and feelings and a personal history as complex as her own, he stopped being something she could just write off as a virus to be deleted or a problem to be wiped. She still has no idea how the fuck any of it works, or how this is all gonna play out in the end for either of them, even in a best case scenario type of situation. And she doesn't even know how much time she has left. She's seen some of Johnny's memories from his time in Mikoshi, Arasaka's soul prison for stored engram constructs. The place he spent the last fifty years. She sees it sometimes in her dreams - it was horrible, cold, and empty in a gnawing way that rattled her to her very soul - an endless, vibrating monotony of not-quite-nothingness. She can't bring herself to to needlessly torture Johnny by locking him back into some smaller soul prison within her own head, just to buy herself the illusion of privacy.
She doesn’t like killing people just because they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In fact, she does everything she can to avoid it. Sure, Johnny did launch himself straight into Arasaka Tower, nuke in hand, so he wasn’t exactly an innocent bystander in any of this, but-
She meets her own eyes in the mirror, but instead of herself, she sees him, standing there fully clothed and staring back at her.
“What the fuck?” she chokes, stepping back. It isn’t the first time the Relic has glitched out like this, but it startles the fuck out of her every time. She can feel the cyberware malfunction blurring her vision, and she leans over and coughs and retches in the sink. She hasn’t eaten much of anything today, so not much comes up. She splashes water on her face, and when she looks up, her own familiar pale gold Kiroshi optical implants stare back at her.
Her eyes fall to the bottle of omega blockers on the counter. Aside from any sense of charity she may be starting to feel towards Johnny, she needs him with her tonight. If she’s gonna talk to Rogue, she wants someone there who knows, or at least knew, the legendary fixer personally. The truth is, Rogue scares the shit out of her. Not in a bad way, though. Rogue is everything she wants to be. Powerful, intimidating, untouchable. And somehow still hot as fuck at over 80. Aside from Johnny’s memories, V’s only ever seen her from a distance in real life, the one time she’s been to the Afterlife prior to tonight, the time she went with Jackie. On what turned into the worst night of her entire life.
She pictures Rogue the way she looked that night, stepping out of her booth, surveying the room like a lion surveying its pride. V’d been unable to tear her eyes away from the silver-haired woman. Unbothered, but alert. Confidant but guarded. Charismatic and terrifying. More than a little bit like Johnny, V realizes now. Makes sense they were chooms.
She can feel Johnny react to that thought, but he buries it too quickly for her to parse out exactly what it is. She sighs and fluffs out her now-dry hair, then steps out of the bathroom and begins rummaging through her closet.
"You want Rogue to take you seriously, so don't dress like some gonk wanna-be solo," Johnny huffs, glitching into existence and leaning against the wall, aviators on.
“Not your dress-up doll, Johnny.” V rolls her eyes and pulls on her leather pants and combat boots, then thinks the better of it and reaches for a different pair with a slight heel. Johnny nods approvingly. V ignores him and reaches for her favorite shirt.
"Not that one," Johnny says.
V frowns. "Fuck you, I like this shirt."
"Got nothing against your weird little shirt, V. I'm just sayin', if you want Rogue to give you the time of day, you gotta turn it up a notch."
V pauses and considers her closet for another moment.
"How about this?" she says, reaching for a black vinyl corset top. Johnny watches her silently as she shimmies it around her shoulders and zips up the front.
"Hmm," he says approvingly.
V thinks for another moment, then grabs her black leather choker. Johnny is straight up smiling now as she fastens it around her neck. She willfully ignores him and crosses the room back to her mirror. Johnny glitches in behind her, leaning against the wall, and gives her a full once over.
"Gotta say, V, you clean up alright."
She rolls her eyes at him again and starts putting on make-up. Johnny takes off his aviators and crosses his arms, still watching her.
"Never seen you wear makeup before."
"Never had a reason to."
Johnny cocks an eyebrow in response, and continues to watch her silently as she finishes applying a dark red lipstick.
“Look at my little merc,” he says, his voice warm with approval.
It’s the most openly affectionate thing he’s ever said to her, and it stops her dead in her tracks. Their eyes meet for an instant, then she recovers and flashes him a cocky smirk, grabs her coat, and heads for the door. Walls up, she thinks.