Work Text:
"You're an angel, I'm a dog
Or you're a dog and I'm your man
You believe me like a god
I'll destroy you like I am
I'm sorry I'm the one you love
No one will ever love me like you again"
Megabuilding H10
Little China, Watson
2:23 AM
Rain falls in slow, heavy sheets against the window.
The stark neon light that floods through the dark apartment is all muddied-up from it, the cityscape casting a warm, fuzzy glow over everything, illuminating the space in a much softer way than usual.
He never asks her to keep the blinds open, knows she has a hard enough time falling asleep as it is. But she does anyway. Every single night.
He wishes he didn’t know exactly why that is, wishes he didn’t feel the sharp pain of the answer twisting itself around in her chest so often- so often lately that he’s not sure anymore if it’s her pain or his own that he’s feeling so intensely.
Regardless, he’s grateful she keeps them open. It’s a meager, but much-needed escape. As fucked as Night City will always be, the view offers him something to hold onto whenever he feels like nothing more than a weightless clusterfuck of pixels and data, always on the verge of fizzling out and disappearing forever if it weren't for little things like this meager tether of home keeping him grounded and somewhat sane.
Somewhat being the fuckin’ understatement of a lifetime- but still. He doesn’t know who or what he even is anymore, but he knows he’d be even more lost without it.
Like every other night, he’s just been sitting here. Watching and waiting. Listening to the droning sounds of the city down below.
For how long exactly, Johnny never knows.
The passage of time is such an entirely foreign concept to him now that it should mean nothing to him. But it does. And in the dead of most nights, all that watching and waiting proves to be a particularly frustrating form of torture in this already hellish new form of existence he’s found himself trapped in.
Somehow, though, throughout all the various forms of existence he’s been unwillingly subjected to, Johnny has never felt more alone than he does right now- during the inconceivable stretches of time when V is fast asleep.
She doesn’t take the blockers anymore, hasn’t in a while now. But every night, Johnny is starkly reminded of what that was kind of like whenever she did- a jarring sense of this profound severance hanging over him, like he’s missing something important. A strange, phantom-like pain he knows all too well from another life, a pain he still vividly remembers lingering for weeks on end after waking up to the chilling sensation of chrome beneath his shaking fingertips where the warm flesh of his left arm should’ve been instead.
Then, a debilitating sense of isolation that follows it, leaving him feeling cold. Empty. And so, so fucking alone.
Johnny knows he can always just reach into her mind and poke around anytime if he’s bored enough like he used to, his stir-craziness and little regard for her back then typically driving him to that brink of such blatant invasiveness, carelessly peering in at whatever dream or memory her subconscious was ruminating over on that particular night.
But that just… doesn’t sit well with him anymore.
Scratching that itch to try and satiate his curiosity and boredom at night lost its appeal pretty early on once he realized V’s sleeping mind is almost more of a jumbled, fucked up mess than it is when she’s awake.
Sometimes it’s inevitable, though. The walls they put up between themselves in the shared space of her mind eventually begin to bulk under the pressure and crack, despite their best efforts. Especially as of late, it seems.
Plus, V’s thoughts are usually so damn loud that he’s pretty sure he could figure out what was going on inside that gonk head of hers even if he wasn’t just a parasitic construct jammed into her neural port.
But she can’t really help it either, Johnny’s gravely come to learn.
The damn kid just… feels too fuckin’ much all the time, her thoughts and emotions plastered all over her mind like a mural- a huge and colorful, abstracted mess of a thing you can’t seem to tear your eyes away from while just trying to make some sense of it all.
And it’s not that much different when she’s asleep, either.
Johnny doesn’t actively swim out to the murky depths of her subconscious or even conscious mind anymore, but he can only wade in the shallows for so long until an enormous wave from her inevitably sweeps over him, pulling him back under to experience part of a painful memory, intense dream, or overwhelming thought or emotion right alongside her.
Parts of V just always end up bleeding over into Johnny. In one way or another.
He realizes now that he knows her better than he’s ever known anyone else- even gets a sinking feeling sometimes that he knows her better than he knows himself.
And Johnny’s not really sure what to do with that.
So, he’s been making an effort lately to stay in the shallow end as much as possible (for her sake, he tries to tell himself)- try and allow her some semblance of privacy and peace from him, especially while she sleeps. He figures it’s only fair to at least keep his distance while she’s unaware and unable to actually kick him out herself if she really wanted to with the blockers, or like when she typically opts to just incessantly chew his ass out until he finally caves and backs off himself to give her some space.
Johnny’s finding it harder and harder not to cave in to her these days, and as his eyes unintentionally drift for a moment across the hazily lit apartment toward the calming, steady rise and fall of V’s chest, he tries not to think too hard about why that is.
He shifts uncomfortably in his typical spot on her couch, pretending not to notice the disheartening lack of any dip or indent on the worn leather surface from the movement- no indication whatsoever that he’s even here at all.
This isn’t any new or profound realization, though. And yet, it still fucking kills him every goddamn time when he lets his guard down for a moment and finds himself noticing it- really noticing it- despite himself.
He’s found that even in doing something as mundane as just fucking sitting, Johnny is starkly reminded of his inability to leave any kind of lasting impression on this world anymore.
He really should be used to this too, by now. He should be used to a lot of the inconceivably fucked-up, unfair rules and regulations of his new form of existence, but he just can’t seem to get past it all. Especially not whenever he absentmindedly tries to do something apparently too human- like reach out for V to steady her during a malfunction, or brush away that strand of hair that always falls in front of her left eye when she’s thinking too hard about something, only to be met with the staticky buzz and glitch of his hand passing right through her entirely.
He'll never get used to that, he knows for sure. But it’s just another thing in all of this that he’s so solemnly and resolutely come to understand by now.
Propping his chrome arm up on his bent knee, Johnny lets out a deep, resounding sigh, resting his cheek exhaustedly into the cool silver of his palm as he stares out into the nightscape of the city.
Christ, when did he get so fucking philosophical and sentimental about all of this bullshit, he wonders?
V must be rubbing off on him even more than he thought.
He forces his thoughts to wander back over to the steady pattering of rain against the glass of the window, becoming quickly transfixed by the lulling noise that blends in nicely with the record V chose to fall asleep to tonight.
Bob Dylan. Again. But his Blood on the Tracks album this time, which Johnny admittedly couldn’t help but give a rare nod of approval for when she picked it out earlier, earning him a shy but sincere grin in return. He felt that faint, little swell of pride that reverberates through her sometimes lately whenever they both genuinely agree on something, almost like she’s fucking won something that he just can’t see.
He tries to, always so unable to stem his curiosity for the strange, inner workings of the little merc.
But when she feels him trying to swim out farther than he usually does, she tenses up at the approach, and the moment’s gone. Her walls go back up again, and Johnny’s never able to get a good enough glimpse of whatever it is V thinks she’s supposedly won from the likes of someone as undeserving and disagreeable as him.
2:49 AM
Raspy vocals accompanied by the soft strumming of an acoustic guitar rumble softly throughout the apartment.
Johnny closes his eyes, tries to stop thinking so damn much and just listen instead.
He did used to really like this album.
When he was just a scrawny little kid still living at home back in Texas, his mom used to sing along to a lot of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez on the radio while doing just about anything around the house. Johnny still remembers how nice her voice had always sounded- soft, smooth, and deep, her words wrapping around him like a warm, velvet blanket.
His mom played music around the house so often that he used to get worried whenever he didn’t hear one of her records or whatever was on the radio at the time echoing softly from the other room she was in.
Looking back, it’s such a stupid thing to worry about as a kid, he knows. But he was always right to worry, as it turned out.
Johnny was just shy of thirteen when she left.
He’d come home from school one day to such a sickening silence hanging throughout the entire house that, somehow, he just knew.
He didn’t need to scour their small, country-trash, trailer home for the usual telltale signs that always offered him a twisted sense of relief: empty liquor bottles and cartons of cigarettes in the trash out back that his lowly, bastard of a father never once bothered to take out to the curb, the ashtray on the kitchen table overflowing with cigarette butts still warm to the touch, or another messily handwritten note taped to the fridge with her nearly illegible cursive scrawl telling him she went out, and there were leftovers in the fridge for dinner.
He didn’t need to be reassured that she was probably just out on another bender at the local dive bar sleazing her way around the rest of the town’s sizable slew of drunks and addicts, and that she’d come stumbling back through the front door either the next morning or the next like she always did.
That day, all Johnny could seem to do anyway was force his gangly, trembling legs to carry him toward his parents’ room where he usually heard the soft echo of her records drifting out from, and the deafening silence he was met with instead told him all he needed to know.
And when he found her shelves of belongings nearly bare for the first time in his life- her favorite books and magazines missing, all her precious records simply gone- Johnny knew she wasn’t coming back this time.
2:51 AM
Suddenly, the charming and emphatic rawness of the voice echoing softly throughout the room starts to sound much more nasally and grating than it did ten seconds ago… or ten minutes ago?
Convincing himself that he probably just needs to stretch out his legs for a bit, Johnny lets out another tired, heavy sigh and glitches from the couch to walk around lazily through the apartment instead.
Gotta keep all this rockerboy code nice and limber, he thinks lamely to himself. Especially in his “old age”, as V would probably remark with that bastardly smirk of hers that’s recently become so eerily familiar to him somehow.
If she was here with him, that is. Really here.
He does this most nights anyway to pass the time, and because he can’t help himself, really. When he can no longer stand sitting and watching and listening with just the company of his own thoughts- the unconscious presence of V’s mind typically just a soft, faraway buzzing that he forces himself to not instinctively reach out for across their link- he instead opts to just idle around her apartment until she eventually wakes up.
He quietly snoops through her extensive collection of belongings like he’s done so many times before. V owns an admittedly interesting variety of some of the most outdated shit he’s ever seen, even by his standards.
He knows her better than he’s ever known another person, and yet, she confounds him entirely. All the fucking time.
Johnny thinks he could spend eternity trying to peel back all of V’s intricate layers just to understand her more, but not even taking up residence in her actual goddamn mind could ever provide him with a proper road map for the frustratingly consuming innerworkings of that kid.
He scans over the thoughtful array of her collection that he’s practically memorized by now- tons of vinyl and CD’s (all mostly from before the fuckin’ twenty-first century); philosophy, poetry, and various fiction novels; and hell, even some goddamn DVD’s, of all things. Those especially, along with the ancient DVD player that she can somehow still get to work by hooking it up to her monitor, were practically extinct pieces of tech even well by the time he died in ’23.
Johnny’s been meaning to ask her where she even gets all this shit.
How such a broke-ass, rookie merc like her ever had the time or eddies to accumulate so much stuff in the less than three years that she’s even been in this city is fucking beyond him. She’s a pack rat through and through; her cherished hoarde of belongings that litter the cramped little apartment, the dozens of posters and photographs that adorn nearly every inch of the walls- they all create such an honest and eclectic mosaic of the real V, the one he knows only people like Jackie and Misty have ever been lucky enough to see.
And himself, now, he guesses. Her very own digital brainworm... Even though it feel a lot like cheating, in a way.
Nonetheless, Johnny keeps the knowledge of this particular part of V close on hand in his arsenal of comebacks for whenever she calls him “old man” or “grandpa”- or some other shit about his age that she knows will undoubtedly strike a nerve, even though he’s repeatedly told her he was only thirty-four when he died. (And “Still am, ya fuckin’ gonk,” he'll then very doggedly remind her.)
But V is nothing if not relentless, and so he bites back by berating her for being such a hypocrite with her bizarrely nostalgic taste in practically anything and everything nearly a century older than she is. And then just to one-up her even more, he'll earn himself a very satisfying flush to her cheeks to along with that exasperated expression he loves being the cause of whenever she so easily takes his teasing bait, whipping around on him in a flustered frenzy for joking about her obvious and very interesting "type".
The fact that he really just finds V’s nostalgic preferences and collection more endearing than anything, though, Johnny tries his best to just keep all to himself.
It helps that her mind is inhibited whenever Johnny can’t help himself from rifling through some of her treasured things to pass the time throughout the night, far too unaware in her sleep to ever catch on to the swell of bittersweet memories and feelings that wash over him as he finds a record or something else of hers that he instantly recognizes, one he also really likes. Or used to like, he guesses.
Only when V is the root cause, does Johnny ever need to actually remind himself of that- the fact that he’s not actually alive anymore.
He can’t help himself from momentarily forgetting their fucked-up circumstances at times, usually whenever he’s just talking or bickering with V about mundane things or unintentionally reminiscing over some of their shared interests, finding out more and more lately that they’re surprisingly more alike than he thinks either of them would ever care to admit.
There’s a sickening guilt that trickles in along with the usual wave of relief that washes over him whenever she manages to somehow make him forget he’s nothing more than a construct of his former self inhabiting her brain.
A digital parasite infecting and decaying her own psyche.
And eventually, all that she is. Every little confounding and endearing thing that makes V, V.
And then the guilt floods in, drowning him in it entirely.
Those momentary lapses of bliss when Johnny falls victim to V’s infectious laugh and exhilarating ability to make the two of them seem like just a couple of normal chooms fucking around and butting heads on time that isn’t borrowed- they all just wash away.
He can’t escape the truth of his devastating effect on her. The fact that he’s slowly killing her, utterly fucking useless as the Relic wears her down more and more each wasted day spent chasing down a solution that may not even exist.
It’s impossible whenever he has to stand by and watch helplessly as V coughs up blood nearly every day now, or when her optics suddenly glow red and he sees the Relic Malfunction Detected warning permeate her vision as she violently shakes and stumbles from the burning pain he feels reverberating through her skull, desperately calling out for him during every attack lately because she’s sure she’s going to die this time and just wants Johnny to be there with her when she finally fades away.
Once and for all.
3:27 AM
He stares distractedly at a stack of her CD’s that he’s already read through probably a million times before by now, realizing he actually does know the order of each title and artist by heart as his eyes falter down to the floor instead, his swarming thoughts completely corrupting his meager attempt at some distraction as the night wanes on.
Johnny huffs in irritation, suddenly not into it anymore, the usual calming effect of perusing through her books and music just making him feel completely empty right now rather than a little more alive.
He can’t fucking do this anymore.
He doesn’t know why he’s feeling this stir-crazy tonight, growing more and more irritable and pent up by the second- or minutes or hours or however fucking long it’s been and however much longer it’s gonna take for V to finally just wake the fuck up already so he can crawl back inside the alleviating company of her thoughts instead of the miserable prison of his own.
Against his will, Johnny glances behind him over to V again, a small part of him hoping that maybe she heard him loud and clear just now in whatever dreamland she’s inhabiting tonight and will be languidly staring back at him through heavy-lidded eyes, ready to groggily lay into him for waking her up in the middle of the night.
But she’s not.
Still soundly asleep. A deep sleep, he notices curiously.
It’s a pretty rare occurrence with V.
She’s such a light sleeper that he often wonders if she’s ever gotten a good night’s sleep in her life. He’s seen too many glimpses of her memories to really blame her for that, though.
V never talks about it- rarely ever did with Jackie, even- but her past creeps its way into her thoughts almost constantly.
She walls those memories off from him whenever she can, but she’s usually far too lost in them to even be aware of Johnny enough to keep him fully out while they momentarily consume her.
He’s caught many snippets of her time roaming the Badlands all on her own, homeless for weeks on end after deserting her clan and the only life she’d ever known. He’s felt some of the restless fear and constant unease that she felt so strongly during that time. He’s felt the rough, wooden grip of the revolver she held onto tightly in her sleep every night beneath the stars in a stolen sleeping bag, or huddled up in some rusty, abandoned shack of a building whenever she was lucky enough to come across one.
Johnny’s felt the profound, gnawing instinct of distrust in other people that she carried around with her practically every place she ended up throughout those next four years. That deep-seeded desire to push people away is already such an inherently familiar notion to him, but V’s feels so much more… palpable- more crucial than anything he’s ever experienced himself.
He knows that whatever V did back then, she truly only did because it felt entirely necessary to her survival. And most of the time, it was.
Johnny wishes he had that same feeling of necessity during all the times he’s ever instinctually closed himself off or snapped at someone that was only trying to be helpful or even just give an actual shit about him… Or whenever he would beat the shit out of some gonk that just looked at him the wrong way for half a second.
The two of them are scarily similar in some ways, but V is different in ways that make Johnny feel like he’s being held under a microscope for the first time in his life. She just cares too fuckin’ much about other people all the time to be solely fueled by hatred in all the ways he is- all the many ways she’s forced him to start to see.
Paranoia and caution are just the minor causes for V’s many restless nights of sleep, however. He knows that those old, instinctual habits during her vulnerable state of unconsciousness have faded significantly over the years, but she hasn’t quite shaken them fully, despite no longer living in constant danger or fear throughout the night.
She still can’t help but jolt awake at even the smallest of noises some nights, immediately alert and deftly tuned in to wherever it came from and how best to neutralize whatever threat it may pose. Johnny’s always there when it happens, and now he’s always quick to try and reassure her that it was nothing- just the faint sounds of her neighbors fucking or yelling like it usually is, or Nibbles noisily batting around a wad of trash that she loves to play with even more than all the fuckin’ cat toys V spent an absurd amount of eddies on.
And when he tells her to just go the fuck back to sleep already, she’ll nod like she always does, wide-eyed and jaw tightly tensed. And eventually she will, but not without getting up to double check that the door is always locked first- or at the expense of another lighthearted, berating comment from himself about it, of course.
Johnny never gives her any shit for the main reason she seems nearly incapable of sleeping peacefully throughout most nights, though.
Sometimes it’s the peculiar look on her father’s face the night she deserted her clan. An overwhelming mix of complicated feelings for Johnny to try and sort through, being tugged back and forth between an intense hatred for the man and a sickening guilt and shame for what she did that night despite it. And fear- of herself. Of the way she felt stalking behind him and raising the hefty revolver like it weighed absolutely nothing- a blinding rage that consumed her entire being and left her pulling the trigger with determined ease and zero hesitation.
Other times, it’s her mom.
Those always start out nice, with glimpses of warm moments between the two of them just listening to music together or watching old western movies. Johnny’s found himself tuning in on these more times than he’d care to admit, just briefly watching on in the dream as a beautiful woman with light hair and startling grey eyes like V’s reads from a book beneath the dim glow of a lamp, captivated by the calming effect of the woman’s soft voice that he’s surprised V still seems to remember so vividly. And then, the glimpses of these warm moments will quickly devolve into warped, debilitatingly painful scenes that leave Johnny reeling and utterly sick to his stomach somehow.
V doesn’t usually last long with these nightmares, waking up almost immediately drenched in sweat and the sticky residue of tears dried all down her face as she pants heavily in silence, the weight of the dream usually leaving her paralyzed in guilt and grief for a while before she’s able to finally shake herself out of its drowning haze. Johnny’s only ever able to catch snippets of the nightmares’ ends, always leaving him with so many unanswered questions about what exactly happened there and why it’s maybe the most impenetrable part of V that she always tries the hardest to completely wall off from him.
The look on her face when she wakes up usually tells him enough, though. At least for the time being.
Whatever happened with her mom, Johnny can clearly tell that V blames herself for it.
And it kills her.
Most of the time, though, her nightmares are about losing Jackie.
Probably because that wound is still so fresh, he guesses. Or maybe just because it’s another death of someone else she loved most in the world. Another death that haunts her to no end because she blames herself for that one, too.
So many nights he’s lost count now, Johnny will suddenly be pulled in from where he was wading impatiently in the shallow end of their shared mind, catching painful glimpses of her nightmare while she relives that damn day that started it all.
It’s strange, he’s always thought, how she’s never actually had any dreams about her own fucking death from that day. Not once.
It’s always Jackie.
Always glimpses of his sickeningly pale face as he bleeds out in the back of the Delamain cab. V’s small, shaking hands covered in her best choom’s blood as she tightly presses them in vain against his bullet wounds, pleading desperately with him through a mess of snot and tears to hold on for Misty and his mom just a little bit longer, screaming at him to just not close his eyes.
Johnny's often wondered if she subconsciously lets herself sit through those particular nightmares all the way to the end. He’s come face to face with V’s confounding mind enough by now to know that it loves to torture her about things like this, things he wishes her gonk brain would stop fucking around with and instead just tell her she really had no control over anyway- that it wasn’t her fault.
But even in her sleep, V is just as stubborn as ever.
Because it isn’t until he’s had to watch the final sliver of awareness seep from the giant man’s eyes, his eerily peaceful, faraway gaze slipping from Johnny's own just as he feels a huge hand go completely limp in V's much smaller one- it isn't until then, that he finally begins to feel V’s mind as more than just the pliant, faint buzzing in the back of his own like usual throughout the night. Not fully awake just yet, but slowly fighting back against her subconscious that’s once again plaguing her sleep with a terrifyingly vivid re-run of that painful day.
And once Johnny hears that robotic, monotone voice so fucking nonchalantly tell V that Mr. Welles has passed, and then ask where to take the remains of the person she’d come to think of as her big brother, only then does he feel V completely come back to him again, wrenching herself out of the dream with a series of painful, desperate screams as she thrashes around wildly in bed and eventually comes to.
Then, her screams weaken into broken sobs, and she untangles herself from her sweat-drenched sheets, shakily sitting up and tucking her legs tightly to her chest. And she’ll just hold herself while she cries, struggling to breathe normally until the images of the dream are no longer burned so vividly into her mind. Some nights it takes only a couple of minutes for V to fully pry herself out of the nightmare, and sometimes it takes nearly an hour of listening to her quiet sobs until they finally falter into tired sniffles, and then one long, painfully heavy sigh.
And even though the presence of her consciousness makes him feel like he can finally breathe again himself, Johnny still keeps his distance on these nights- especially on these nights. Doing what he always does, he waits- just watching and listening. He keeps his distance because he knows she wants him to, can feel her innate and profound desire to just be left alone during such a vulnerable and painful moment, her shame and guilt rolling off her in thick waves that try to push him back as far as possible while she struggles to regain some sense of clarity and composure.
He doesn’t give in to the feeling of wanting to just glitch over by her side and help coax her out of the nightmare quicker than she usually does on her own, even though the sight of V’s small, shaking shoulders as she holds herself and cries makes his chest constrict painfully- when that in itself shouldn’t be possible for his digitized body to even feel.
He leaves her alone because she wants him to, he tells himself. Not because he also somehow feels paralyzed in place by his own fear at watching her like that and knowing that nothing he could do or say would probably help enough, anyway. Not really.
Johnny can’t make the nightmares stop invading her sleep night after night. He can’t wipe her mind of the images from that day that endlessly haunt her.
He can’t bring Jackie back for her.
So, he stays away, feeling just as inadequate and pathetic as he does during another Relic malfunction.
And while her eyes frantically search around the apartment afterwords, searching for him, he tries not to think of how similar it is, as well, to when she calls out for him during an attack. He’ll do his best to appear like his normal, stoic self, lazily leaning his ‘ganic shoulder against her window and gazing out at the city as if he didn’t just ride shotgun in her nightmares again or witness her unraveled, broken mess of a state afterward.
The sudden warmth and ease that flows out from V as of late when she finally does notice him is so palpable that it floods Johnny with an intense feeling all the same.
Or maybe he’s just feeling a sense of what she feels again because of the Relic? He’s never quite sure anymore. The lines where V ends and Johnny begins have blurred together so much lately that he’s since stopped trying so hard to distinguish what is solely hers and solely his. For better or for worse, they are mirrors to each other’s minds and souls now. If he even still has a soul anymore, that is.
Nonetheless, he never gives her shit for making him feel such an all-consuming, confusing flood of warmth once she notices him leaning in his usual spot against the window.
Johnny never gives her shit at all when she dreams of those she’s lost, incapable of sleeping peacefully yet again because of nightmares he’s become all too familiar with, despite his valiant efforts to leave her be throughout the night.
He doesn’t say a thing even as he watches her exhaustedly get out of bed to go make herself a cup of coffee like she always does- the first of many- knowing full well that she'd rather sit and choke the scalding liquid down by the gallon than close her eyes again that night for longer than even a moment, let alone actually try falling back asleep.
He doesn’t even say anything when on some nights, when she’s really shaken up, V will drag her tired body right past the cheap coffee maker and over to the small cabinet above her desk instead, where she’ll grab a bottle of shitty vodka before flopping down on the couch to wait out the rest of the inconceivable hours of the night with the warm, fuzzy feeling of alcohol sitting heavily on her empty stomach, effectively dulling the images of the dream that still painfully prod at her in the back of her mind.
The waves of shame and guilt will still flow out of V as she sits there, just staring out blankly at the city and trying her best to ignore the burn in her throat with each sickening swig from the bottle.
But Johnny knows her better than anybody by now, and on those nights when she turns to his old ways of coping, he finally gives in, ignoring her mental waves that still try to push him back- albeit much weaker than before. And he’ll glitch from his spot by the window to join her on the couch and wait with her for the night to end, like he always does.
Sometimes V will eventually break the silence, despite how calming and comfortable it can strangely be between the two of them, especially as of late. She’ll take another sip of coffee or another awful swig of vodka that he fucking hates, and because she knows him better than anyone else by now, she’ll ask him something that she knows is probably… safe- safe enough to ask him about, at least. Something simple to try and distract herself with until the light of dawn finally begins to creep through the apartment. And Johnny will happily oblige like he always does, even going above and beyond by breaking out his eccentric and dramatic storytelling skills while recounting another wild time from his Samurai days.
And just like he always does on those nights, Johnny will feel that crushing mix of guilt and relief again at having more than just the company of his own thoughts to hold onto until morning.
It’s a feeling that never really goes away around her, a sharp something near his heart that has slowly taken complete dormancy within him, so familiar to him now that he’s long forgotten what it felt like without the pressure of it weighing so heavily on him, yet simultaneously lifting him up somehow, as well.
Out from the depths of the inconceivable abyss that has become his new reality.
4:03 AM
The softened, peaceful expression she wears is rare, so much gentler than the wearied face contorted in pain, exhaustion, or dejection that Johnny is so used to seeing whenever V looks in the mirror lately.
He feels like such a fucking asshole.
It’s a good night. Not another sleepless one for her. He berates himself for lamenting over the countless bad nights he’s witnessed as he continues pacing anxiously around the apartment while V sleeps on.
She’s not waking up this time and saving him from his own torturous, cognitive Hell.
Angrily running his ganic’ hand through his hair, Johnny glitches away again to lean against the window he’s no longer interested in staring out of endlessly, rain still thumping heavily against the glass at his back.
He chuckles grimly and half-heartedly to himself, considering how ironic it is that just a little over a month ago now, he was standing in this very spot, threatening to take control and wanting nothing more than this confounding, intoxicating merc girl completely out of the picture. And now, he has somehow become so comfortable and pathetically dependent on her presence that even just the dulled noise of it during the night has such a frenzied and unsettling effect on him.
Johnny conjures up a cigarette from whatever pixelated realm allows him such a comforting pretense of the small luxury that makes him feel more human sometimes, more like his old self.
If he tries hard enough, he can even convince himself he feels an actual nicotine buzz coursing through him, settling his mind and calming his nerves. It doesn’t always work, but just the familiarity of the whole façade is grounding for him, nonetheless.
He takes a drag anyway just to have something to do right now, something other than just fucking thinking.
Always thinking, and thinking, and thinking.
That’s all he ever fucking does lately, all he can do as this digital ghost version of his old self.
He’s envious of the soft, peaceful expression that V wears now, and he knows he’s a fucking asshole for it. But he guesses it’s just another thing he won’t ever be able to fully get used to, even though he really should be by now.
Most nights, the idea of succumbing to the feeling of V’s exhaustion and allowing himself to simply close his own eyes and fall asleep along with her is almost enticing enough in itself to even attempt to.
But Johnny can’t actually sleep like this- like how V is now. Not really.
What he can do is a far fucking cry from the actual thing he admittedly took for granted far too often back when he was alive. He thinks he could probably count on one hand the times he actually remembers falling asleep like normal at all, either drinking himself into oblivion for the majority of his blissful hours of unconsciousness or pumping himself full of so many uppers that instead just did nothing but keep him awake for days on end during the rest of his miserably unsatisfying existence.
And now, all Johnny can do whenever V’s bone-tired exhaustion washes over him, is close his eyes and recede back into the dark depths of her unconscious mind where he can either poke around some or simply sit idly by in there instead, as opposed to at least being out in the comforting openness of her eclectic apartment.
He can’t actually join in on her blissful state of unawareness and fall into one of his own, though. And not for lack of trying, either.
He just can’t do things like that anymore. Too human for him, he guesses. Too alive.
Johnny sucks in one more deep inhale of pixelated smoke, feels the crushing absence of the burn in his lungs that he knows should be there, and flicks the cigarette away with a gruff sigh, watching it glitch and fizzle out into nothingness before it even hits the ground.
He feels himself disappearing on instinct only to reappear instantly over by the door to her armory, needing to distance himself from the peaceful way V’s chest rises and falls in her sleep, with Nibbles curled up against her and both just blissfully unaware of his spiraling mental state as the night endlessly wanes on. He starts pacing back and forth wildly, unintentionally glitching in and out across the apartment and nervously wringing his hands through his hair as the suffocating thoughts from his voice only continue to unravel him.
Probably for the best that he can’t even sleep like fucking normal anyway, Johnny tries to convince himself as he paces irritably.
Because what if he did actually allow himself that luxury, only to wake up the next morning in a body much more lithe and smaller than his own, one adorned with tattoos he’s memorized being etched only onto tanned, olive skin far richer in tone than the grimy, scraped-up pallidness of his own?
Ever since he brought her to the Pistis Sophia when he thought she was flatlining, Johnny has been terrified that he’ll wake up one day instead of her, and V will just be gone.
And he’ll be left behind without the relief of her constant presence he’s grown so accustomed to. Forced to walk around in her body that he unwillingly stole from her, the reflection of those captivating, grey eyes gazing mournfully back at him in every mirror or reflective surface, forever reminding him of yet another broken, empty promise he wasn’t able to keep- the most important one.
Johnny stops in his tracks, re-appearing back over to the side of V’s bed before he’s even aware of himself glitching out again in the first place.
His chrome hand drifts to his dog tags resting safely around her neck- their permanent new residence ever since he gave them to her. He hasn’t seen her take them off even once since that day.
Johnny flinches just slightly despite himself at the familiar tingling buzz in his silver fingertips as they glitch through the small, metal pendant nestled against her tanned skin.
He’d never been good at keeping promises back when he was still alive. All he ever did was let the people closest to him down, over and over again. He got complacent with being that person, even, after a while. And he knows everyone else in his life pretty much just accepted that he’d always be that type of person, too.
But not V.
When she accepted his dog tags that day, cradling them so delicately in her hands as she told him with unwavering sincerity that, yes, she would take a bullet for him, Johnny knew this promise was going to be different. It had to be.
V’s trust in him is intoxicating.
And as devastatingly misguided and naïve as Johnny knows that trust in him probably is, it still feels so real to him- so terrifyingly real that it ignites something dormant within him that wants nothing more than to just make it worth something for once in his miserable goddamn existence.
V’s trust in him feels like nothing he’s ever experienced before.
Something so undeniably honest and selfless that's been given to him like this, even despite all the shit she's been through because of him... something like that is far too precious to just let go to waste. As inconceivable as it still may seem to him at times, he'd be dammned to now just let such unwavering loyalty all be in vain.
So, it’s his life for hers.
And to prove that to V, to ever possibly reciprocate just how much the selflessness of her trust means to him, Johnny wanted her to have the most precious piece of himself he could offer her in return. His military tags.
They represent the very opposite of what was promised to him all those years ago when he was just an angry, naïve fifteen-year-old kid looking for purpose and glory, only to walk away from it all with scars that would never heal and more hatred burning through him than ever before.
They are the embodiment of what his promise to V is- a promise to himself just as much as it is to her.
They represent his aching will to prove that he’s not just that person who is utterly complacent in inevitably letting down everyone he cares about.
They represent a chance to make amends- to the person who once sacrificed everything for him, and now to V, who Johnny wants more than anything to do the same for.
In more ways than one, they represent a life for a life- in a past life, and now in this one, as well.
4:47 AM
As Johnny gazes down at his old tags rising gently up and down against V’s chest, he feels the soft buzzing of her mind begin to stir and shake.
And as quickly as it always happens, he’s suddenly pulled under by an enormous wave of bits and pieces crashing down on him, his vision permeated by the swirling images and sensations racing through her sleeping mind.
A sweltering, sticky humidity weighing down his already exhausted limbs as he hefts his gun up over his shoulder and continues on through the thick jungle foliage.
Bodies littering the ground all around him, familiar faces covered in blood and grime and sweat as he’s forced to step over them to escape the gunfire ringing in his ears.
Someone he knows even better than all the unmoving corpses beneath his feet, running toward him and slamming him out of the way of an immense, blinding blast that rips the two of them apart, leaving Johnny behind to fall back into the mud beside the rest of the bodies. The man that shoved him out of harm’s way nowhere in sight.
A blaring pain in his left arm, reaching up only to find that the arm itself is just gone entirely as he screams out the very same name written on one of his tags around V’s neck.
But as the wave suddenly spits Johnny back out to where he’s still knelt beside her bed, it’s his name that he hears pierce the air around them.
“Johnny!”
V jolts awake, thrashing wildly as she suddenly comes to from the nightmare.
His nightmare.
She pants heavily and whips her head around the apartment in search of him, but he’d already glitched away even before she opened her eyes.
“Johnny?” V’s broken, raspy voice pleads out quietly. He can feel her fear and confusion almost as starkly as his own. This has never happened before. She’s never dreamt about his memories…
He can’t begin to try and understand how the Relic works exactly, but he knows that this can’t be fucking good. V must be fading even faster now, reliving his own goddamn memories in her sleep too, as real as if she’s the one that got her fuckin’ arm blown off instead of him. Fuck. How did this happen, Johnny wonders? He must’ve triggered it somehow… Fuck, fuck.
He's killing her more and more, pushing out her own past and experiences to make room for his now. How could he let this happen…
“J- Johnny, please,” she cries out desperately, staring out into the dark, vacant apartment. “What… was that?”
Images and sounds from that fateful day in the jungle flood his thoughts; things he’s always tried so hard to push down and forget, too fuckin’ painful to ever let himself think about without the numbing effects of something else more damaging coursing through his bloodstream. But he can’t escape them like this- here, in the dark corners of V’s mind where the same images and sounds are now also burned deeply into, all because of him.
“Johnny?” V chokes out his name around another broken sob. He can’t see her, but if he focuses enough on her own senses, he can almost feel the wet stream of tears stained on her cheeks and the drumming of her heartbeat pounding rapidly in her quivering chest. “Please— don’t fucking shut me out, Johnny,” she pleads out into the empty space around her.
All he can manage is a quiet thought in response, hoping that she’ll just take the hint and leave him alone about it for the rest of this miserable, never-ending night.
Just leave it, V.
Still, she relents, just as goddamn stubborn as always.
“No- fuck,” she breathes out through a shaky cry. “That wasn’t— those weren’t mine, Johnny. I- I don’t…”
V trails off dejectedly, and Johnny feels an immense weight of guilt gnawing at him from the devastating tone of her voice alone. Still, he wishes she would just go back to fucking sleep. As much as it kills him knowing that this is all his fault, he couldn’t even begin to try and explain any of it to her. Not when he doesn’t even understand himself.
Maybe his irritation is steadily seeping into her as well, because then he feels it intensify into an overwhelming frustration pouring out from V, both of them snapping under the pressure from the sudden trauma and grief of his memories. And what that all even implies for their increasingly fucked up, shared situation.
“Get your ass out here, you dick! Please, Johnny, I just wanna talk—"
Johnny materializes instantly, his face right up in her own as he screams down at her furiously, anger rolling off of him in enormous waves of his own that push back on her where she sits up meakly in bed. “I said LEAVE IT, V! FUCK! Just stay the hell out if for once, you miserable cunt!”
V stills completely, saying nothing. For awhile, she just blinks up at him in wide-eyed fear. It feels as though all the air has been painfully sucked from Johnny's lungs at the mere sight of her so shell-shocked like that. Images of a bruised, bloodied, and bandaged-up V circulate rapidly through the swirling cloud of anger muddying up his mind, parting it just enough to be struck by the recollection of their first real encounter for the second time tonight.
Not that Johnny could ever possibly forget, though. How could he, after how far they've managed to come since that god-awful beginning to their tumultuous relationship?
He hated not knowing who the fuck he was actually dealing with at first. He figured she was probably just some strange, battered joytoy with her own ridiculously depressing BD experience or some shit- a brand new type of purgatory for his waning psyche to now be subjected to until the end of time. That possibility made the most sense to his foggy and numbed sense of awareness, at least, when he was suddenly wrenched from his fifty-year long metaphysical limbo in Mikoshi by a jarring barrage of scattered memories and experiences that definitely weren't his own, yet somehow felt as though they were...
Johnny didn't know what to make of V the night he discovered he could partially squirm his way out from deep within her grey matter, glitching his bizarre new pixelated form into existence inside the cluttered shoebox of an apartment she was passed out asleep in. But after just a couple of minutes spent internally itching for a cigarrette as loudly as possible and feeling like a damn agitated magnet just even being near the bitch while she continued to sleep on, totally unaware of his presence, Johnny had decided that he wasn't going to just stand idly by in the back of her mind as nothing more than some complacent, silent passenger throughout whatever the fuck all of this was.
He remembers staring down at V's weak, crumpled form that night with an animosity that buzzed through him like lightning, so incredibly frustrated by the notion of being trapped within the mental and physical confines of such a pathetic and scared looking nobody little brat like her- the absolute bullshit irony in just how much her outwardly helplessness mirrored his own innermost feelings and fears. And despite not yet knowing the capabilities of his new fully digitized state of being, all Johnny wanted in that moment was to just take back some semblence of control- all sense of control, even, if he somehow actully could.
He wanted to hurt her, kick her hard enough while she was already down so she would have no choice but to keel over completely and let him take over. And maybe then, he'd actually stand a fighting chance at figuring this shit out so he could go and get whatever was still left of his old life back.
Out of everything from that night, though, Johnny probably remembers the look on V's face the most, right after knocked the pill bottle out of her desperate, trembling hands. The ice-cold chill he felt run through her veins at the vile command he spat down at her as he did it, realizing far too late that he had subconsciously chosen each and every word specifically from glimpses of her memories...
"Stick some iron in your mouth and pull the fucking trigger."
The same exact words from her past that haunt her endlessly, initially thrown down at her feet many years ago, along with a revolver belonging to her own bastard of a father- the only other person in this world that V has ever been so infinitely afraid of, and the only other person that's been on the recieving end of such a horrifically fearful expression as the one V wore the night she and Johnny first met.
And the one she wears now.
Even Nibbles seems to sense the broiling tension in the room, scrambling down from her spot beside V with a small spit of alarm in his direction as she skulks off to hide out beneath the desk instead.
With that, Johnny steps back tentatively from the bed, sighing out exhaustedly and hanging his head in shame.
He's always been sure that fucking cat somehow knows he’s here. And she’s probably scared shitless of him too now.
He doesn’t know why he bites.
It’s just in his nature, he guesses. Always has been.
When Johnny looks up from the floor to face her again, he watches as the stunningly sharp expression that V typically dawns slowly wilts instead from that rare, profound fear at the volatile snap of his words, and into one much, much worse. One born of utterly pained disbelief. A dejection that cuts irrevocably deep, like a knife.
Somewhere within the sprawling and complicated code of whatever the hell he even is now, Johhny feels that familiar pang of guilt creep through him, consuming him entirely. The hurt in V’s eyes makes him shudder slightly, pathetically. He can feel the questions buzzing around in her skull like an angry, addled hornets’ nest. But Johnny doesn’t need to wade through the mess of her thoughts this time to try and understand why she looks at him the way she does now. He knows what V wants from him. He always does.
Another deep sigh of aggravated defeat is all he can manage, though.
Tearing his gaze away, he glitches out of V’s sight for the rest of the night, cowering back into the dark recesses of her mind where he always hides out whenever one of them hurts the other this badly. Or whenever he just simply can’t bear the weight of her intense, startling grey eyes on him any longer.
It’s more than unnerving, the way V can instantly set his digitized nerves on fire with that stare full of unspoken words only he can hear.
She drives him fucking crazy half the time; in some ways, it's almost as if nothing has changed between them since that fateful first night, yet in actuality, everything has. He despises how quickly she’s able to weaken his resolve now. It’s getting too goddamn hard to constantly fight off his typical instinct to claw and lash out at her the more they blur together like this. And with all of her misguided thoughts and feelings toward him at full display, it’s getting even harder to ignore just how palpable the concern or trust or affection, even, feels emanating out from her sometimes.
He doesn’t deserve it. And it kills him.
So, he bites.
And despite how much better he knows V deserves, Johnny just can’t seem to control himself around her, snarling and snapping his teeth at her tentatively outstretched hands every time they reach out for him across their shared space within her mind.
The more blood Johnny seems to unwillingly draw from the confounding, intoxicating merc, the more he doubts he’ll ever truly learn any better.
Even from her.