Chapter Text
Rogue comes to him with the job while he’s scraping himself off the floor of the dressing room at Rainbow Cadenza.
“How would you like to get paid to do what you’ve always wanted to do, Johnny?” she says, buzzing with something way too strong for this early in the morning.
Johnny is hungover, kicking bottles out of the way to try and find a medkit in a cabinet with some BounceBack, anything to settle his melting brain. “Already get paid to scream my lungs out every night, Rogue,” he’s grumbling. “And I’m not fuckin’ in it for the money.”
“Right,” she says. “It’s the glory.”
“Did you come here just to question my shit, Rogue? Again?” Johnny groans. “Thought you were done with that. And speakin’ to me. This can’t wait until later?”
“No. This thing is bigger than your whole goddamn career, Johnny. In a week, I’m robbing Yorinobu Arasaka.”
—
Alt is always so hot and cold. First, she tells him she’s sick of him in about as many words as Rogue did, near the end of their thing. Then they fuck it out—and the loop starts over. Something he said, some shit she doesn’t like about his attitude, personality, values, morals, whatever—Johnny’s on too many uppers to care at this point.
After she climbs off him she grabs the shard on the table in front of the grimy backstage couch and shoves it into the side of her deck without asking. And when she catches wind of the job it details, scrolling through that tiny screen, he can’t do anything to stop her from inviting herself. She snaps the cyberdeck shut with a click, returns it to its holster.
“You’re gonna need a netrunner, someone to break you in, keep the systems quiet,” she’s saying, standing up and pacing topless around the green room, one hand to her lip in deep thought.
Johnny grabs a Nicola Classic off the table next to the bottles of alcohol that are always on his rider. The can cracks open with a hiss and he dumps it into a half finished glass of whiskey, watered down by melted ice while he and Alt had been busy heating each other up. With sex. Which was much better than the kind of fuckery he can tell she’s getting at.
Alt keeps talking.
“But I have to go in with you. There’s no way to remote access AHQ outside the building without getting hit with black ICE or NetWatch coming for you. If you want even the slightest chance of getting into that fortress and surviving, I need to open every door.”
Johnny closes his eyes and wishes he could close his ears. His head hits the wall a few times with some thunks, he puts the glass of Nicola and whiskey down sourly, the post-fuck good mood dissipating rapidly. “D’you seriously think I’m gonna let you in on this?” he’s saying. “First of all, it’s fuckin’ dangerous. Second of all, Rogue’s not gonna like this—“
“—Because you’re fucking me,” Alt finishes shortly. “Doesn’t matter. You won’t get anywhere near that tower without my help.” She puts her shirt back on, her necklaces jingle. She’s pacing again.
Johnny groans.
“Who’s the runner you have now?” Alt asks.
“Dunno, someone Rogue knows from the Atlantis—“
“They’re out.”
Johnny mulls this over, tries to think of a way out of it without directly being responsible for telling her no so she won’t get mad. “If Rogue says yes, fuckin’ fine. But there’s no way.”
“This isn’t up for debate, Johnny. You think you’re the only one in the world with a chip on your shoulder for these corpos? Arasaka has something of mine.”
“Uh? The fuck did they take from you?”
“My work,” she says simply, serious, stepping into her boots, tugging at the laces sharply. “Ask Rogue.”
—
“Alt Cunningham wants in?” Rogue says, surprised, actually turning away from the second floor Atlantis bar to give him her full attention—rare these days. Johnny catches how the bartender glances at them both warily when Rogue’s voice raises over the bass of awful techno shit they play in here, steeled for another one of their storms.
But Johnny doesn’t really want to cause a scene again. He puts up his hands placatingly. “I know, I know, Rogue, I already told her you wouldn’t like it.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Rogue says, gawking at him like he’s the stupidest person alive. “She’s the best netrunner in Night City, hell, possibly all of NorCal, possibly all the states now that Bartmoss and Five’re gone. It would be gonk stupid not to put her on this job.”
“How the fuck does everyone seem to know this about Alt except me?” Johnny grouses.
“Because we don’t have fuckin’ worms for brains, Johnny. Do you even know anything about her other than what she feels like on your dick?” Rogue shoots back, losing interest in him again, stirring one of those tiny straws in her drink. She doesn’t even reprimand him for leaking the details of the job. “Now get the fuck out of here before people start asking me if we’re on good terms again, don’t you have a guitar to tune or something?”
“Hang on,” he says. “Alt’ll only do it in exchange for something that’ll change the plan a bit.”
“What?”
“I don’t fuckin’ know, apparently ‘Saka stole some kind’ve program from her—she’ll only help if we use this chance to get it back.”
“Well,” Rogue is shrugging. “Ring her holo. Let’s meet.”
—
“It’s not my program. I only expanded on Soulkiller 2.0,” Alt explains, arms crossed. Johnny has never seen her like this before. She has a familiar thing in her eyes, that thrumming focus of plotting out some really fucked up shit. It’s a hunger. It’s hot as fuck. “You see—Soulkiller originally was tethered to whoever was running it—it wasn’t meant to hunt runners or mobilize. Until I taught it to. Until Arasaka stole the program from me.”
But this shit doesn’t sit well with him, the fact that she made an upgraded version of something he heard someone once describe as ‘worse than death’. It was just an ugly urban legend until Alt started unraveling the whole thing in front of them, here. It makes him nauseated, itchy, and thirsty for something 90 proof or higher, all at once.
“Soulkiller was initially scripted by a netrunner who went by Five back in the day. Arasaka supposedly got their hands on it and Five, used it on its creator to silence them, and have been developing it into something marketable ever since.”
“The relic program,” Rogue acknowledges, listening intently.
Johnny, Alt, Rogue, and her stupid new output, partner, whatever—he’s called Santiago—all sit in the same back room of the Atlantis, Johnny chain smoking as Rogue and Alt go over their plans. Each of them with different goals that mesh together nearly perfectly. Almost too convenient, Johnny thinks. As far as he’s concerned, Rogue is just his ticket for the trip he’s been waiting to make his entire life, and she’s first class.
Plus it's finally something he can shove up the asses of all the other Atlantis mercs who barely give him the time of day anymore since he fell out with Rogue.
Not that he gives a shit.
“I’m tellin’ you this is overcomplicating things,” he argues, blowing smoke. “Let's shove two nukes in there and level the damn thing. Goodbye Soulkiller, goodbye Arasaka, exterminate the corporat’s nest. It’s easy.”
“But taking Soulkiller from Arasaka is far more meaningful,” Alt is doubling down. “You’ve always wanted to shit in their mouth, Johnny. I know all this cyber stuff means jack to you and gutting the tower is enough.”
“Good old fashioned riot,” Johnny grins. “Still, not enough unless it finishes ‘em off. Hence… Arasaka, meet nuclear fission.” He presses his hands together and makes a mock explosion gesture to emphasize.
“Arasaka has invested fifty years of pure, hard cash in the relic business, all enabled by Soulkiller,” Alt replies cooly. “You wanna make sure the titan falls? This will do it. All I have to do is get into their mainframe, access their subnetwork, copy it over, then erase it. Leveling the building won’t destroy backups held on offsite, linked servers.”
“Fuckin’ fine, then,” he says, blowing smoke into the air. If she’s not gonna back down, he’s not gonna press it. “Get the freaky program that rips your soul outta your body from the dirty corpos? Sure, we’ll do that too. Why the fuck not.”
Alt just looks at Rogue. “The relic that client wants you to steal? If it’s special, something new… when it disappears, they’ll have nothing of the relic program left at all. We do this, everyone gets what they need, and they’ll lose everything.”
Johnny's just about to ask what the hell she means by special or new, which is, of course, when Thompson walks into the room, waving a hand behind him at the door.
"AVs are ready," he says, and Santiago is already standing up. The glowing red light of his ocular implant flashes briefly in Johnny's eyes, indicating that he's already filming. "Los Lobos are all set up on the Militech route."
Johnny claps his hands together, stands up, looks between Alt and Rogue, who meet his careless gaze with expressions still frozen in sharp, strategist seriousness. It’s simultaneously the scariest and hottest thing. Normally he’d voice this aloud and embrace whatever venomous dismissal both women would spit at him for it, but he’s on his own clock today and lets it go, saves it for later.
“Well,” he says. “Let’s go grab ourselves some bombs."
—
Getting the nuke? Piece of cake. It comforts Johnny to know that even the greatest military corporations in the world will still lose to one organized Nomad family in the Badlands, every single time. The Aldecaldos work like hellhounds, burn through the dry grass and chaparral like it’s fuel. He figures Thompson’s footage of the entire raid must’ve come out pretty fucking nova.
Unfortunately, their luck seems to end there. On the day of the heist, the job itself goes to absolute shit.
As he and Alt fling themselves off the edge of Arasaka Tower in the rain towards God knows what, as long as it’s away from the militarized private AVs currently firing on them, he realizes there’s no better way to recognize the sheer scale of the beast you’ve spent years chasing until you’re in its belly. Arasaka is just that.
Their crash landing is one of the roughest Johnny’s ever endured. They slam through layers upon layers of glass into some kind of atrium, impact barely cushioned by sand and narrowly missing cracking their skulls open on massive decorative stones.
A rock garden. The glass hits the stones and surrounding wood floors with a tinkling sound, further clinking against other bloody shards as Johnny pants and groans, shifts to pull himself back together. Rain, though less of a downpour this deep down inside, drips in rhythmically, darkening the sand.
Alt definitely got hit the worst. She looks absolutely fucked. He groans, begins to reach out to her, but she’s the first to crawl over to the case and his head whips around to find their other piece of delicate, highly explosive cargo, bag half buried by sand and glass. He thanks whatever deity he can think of that the nuke made it without accidentally detonating. He unzips the duffel to check—the tiny LED screen is cracked—but still lit and powered. Hopefully operable.
“Johnny, the chip’s integrity,” Alt gasps for his attention, clutching her bloody abdomen.
“Can’t let it die, I know, I fuckin’ know,” he grunts, crawling through the glass that skitters around their knees to grab her biocase and check the screen, which is flashing red, the universal signal for them being in deep shit. Blood, also red and a universal signal for someone being in deep shit, is running off Alt in rivulets from shredded sections of the black runner bodysuit.
Johnny wants to do nothing but make her abort the rest of her plans. But the unsettling focus of old military training kicks in as he clicks the case open—Rogue is shouting something at them through comms.
“Adam Smasher is after you two and he’s coming down from the landing pad,” she’s saying, panic clearly there. “Drop the case. One of you needs to shove that biochip in your head and get the fuck out of there if you want any chance of getting Soulkiller off their servers before they smoke you out.”
Alt is already doing it before she finishes speaking, Johnny trying to get a word in, snapping, “Wait—fuck, is that safe—!?“
“It’s the only way to stabilize it. It’s not just a chip, it’s alive,” Alt talks over him, steely, measured. “Therefore, we save it by placing it inside a living thing. Make sense?” She’s slamming a BounceBack into a tear in her suit just above her knee, hisses in pain, then stands up, shivering, eyes flashing blue as whatever is in the relic runs through her. Johnny moves in a motion to help her, but she throws a hand up in his face. “I’m good, Johnny. We’re going, Rogue.”
A few more floors down, they’re crouched behind a sleek black desk in an empty glass meeting room waiting for guards to clear the area. Alt clicks away at the terminal that controls stupid corpo spreadsheets and presentations, digging past useless shit into the core of the company. Red lights and an alarm blare in and out in the hall. She’s jacked in, but her eyes have never stopped flashing since the relic was inserted, and it’s freaking Johnny out on top of everything else. Lighting fires, starting riots to get them in here, he did his part to start this and he’s antsy to end it as fast as possible. But in Alt’s territory he has nothing to do except question their odds and grip his Malorian on watch duty.
He still considers telling her to give this up so they can leave. The only thing stopping him is that he knows she'll really never fuck him again if they abort now and he doesn’t want to fuck Rogue over.
“I can do it from here,” Alt breathes raggedly, almost reverent, her eyes glowing, unseeing. The cables at her cyberdeck and wrist catch against the bloody tears in her suit as she moves, tapping at the monitor. The last of the Arasaka guards file past in the hall in their heavy squeaking boots, their comms echoing multiple commands and updates.
"The path's open," she says, finally, unplugging. As she does it the blaring alarms stop, and the silence becomes sudden and deafening. "Let's go down."
All of the cameras and drones signal green and blue for them as Johnny helps her limp to an elevator, blood trailing behind them on the floor. They encounter no guards, no employees, and at this point the emptiness is far more unnerving for Johnny than the alarm was.
He helps Alt onto the netrunning chair in the freezing mainframe and pings Rogue.
"Alt's in place," he says, breath coming out in wisps, illuminated red from the walls upon walls of servers.
"AV's on its way, building's beginning to clear. Except for these fucks," Rogue replies, gunfire and chaos in the background of her holo. “Gave Smasher a good distraction, hopefully it’ll hold him off. Load up the payload, give me the countdown, and get back up here as soon as you can.”
Johnny grabs the duffel with the nuke inside and hoists it over one shoulder. "Gonna plant this thing," he grunts through the holo, then glances back at Alt, hesitating. "You'll be good?"
"Go, Johnny. I'll get Soulkiller." And with that, she grasps the link cable, holding it ready near the neural port behind her ear.
“Got it,” he says, just as Rogue shouts through static, “I’ll meet you both upstairs. You have fifteen minutes. Then we delta.”
“Once I begin this, don’t unplug me. No matter what,” Alt says, jacking herself in. “And whatever happens, make damn sure this chip gets out of here. Alive.”
Johnny gives her one last wave and dips out of the room. It’s time for what he came here for. Fireworks.
As he descends a stairwell, speakers crackle overhead. Across the loudspeakers of the entire building, Alt’s gently amused voice echoes—though slightly unfamiliarly digitized—reciting poetry. He should have known he wasn’t the only one in this group with a penchant for theatrics. He just didn’t particularly expect it from her. But, he supposes, thinking on Spider’s arachnid themed sayings, an obsession with all forms of intellectual shit just seems to come naturally to netrunners. Alt’d be no exception.
“'I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
Please evacuate the building immediately.”
Johnny listens idly while he plants the bomb and sets the timer, her ethereal voice going silent just as he finishes. He holos the rest of the team confirmation and starts making his way back to her.
“Copy,” Thompson’s voice rattles into his ear. “AV en route.”
Then, a few moments later, Alt’s communications go dead abruptly in a deafening explosion of garbled static that pierces everyone's eardrums.
Johnny doesn’t even flinch. He just curses and bolts up the stairs three at a time to the mainframe floor, willing every thought in his head into pure, total silence, the chatter of everyone chaotically demanding an explanation over the comms network muffled except for the piercing ringing his ears, the aftermath of the sound of something gone terribly wrong.
When Johnny makes it back to her, she’s limp, eyes closed. The whole time, her blood has been pooling on the floor, dripping from the edge of the chair in a quiet, rhythmic pace. He’s blind with rage, he shakes her, shouting her name, but there’s no feedback or reaction. He can’t think. He can’t confirm the flatline. There’s a bomb beneath them.
“Time’s up, Alt,” Johnny growls, desperate, clutching her face, fingers threading through her hair. She doesn’t react. His fingertips graze the slot behind her ear. He makes a noise of frustration, pulls the relic out and slams it into his own head, trying to salvage anything. His voice comes out choked, imploring. “I’m not fuckin’ leaving without you.”
He shoves the Malorian into his waistband and unplugs her.
—
They somehow make it to the AV, Thompson grimly holding one arm out into the downpour to pull them into the dark interior, only light the red pinpoint glow of his camera. Rogue jumps in first, and as the vehicle hovers, ready to leave, Johnny maneuvers Alt’s limp body up into her arms.
He has one hand gripping the slippery metal doorframe, Rogue reaching out to assist, when Adam Smasher lodges a bullet in his gut.
He falls as the sound of the shot catches up to him, doubling over while Rogue begins screaming curses, then his name, Thompson grappling to hold her back.
He’s snarling at them to just go, get the fuck out of there, the sound of the rain and blasting engines and blood in his ears somehow not louder than the sound of Smasher laughing and laughing as the AV takes off.
Smasher kicks him over; he unloads a full clip into the sorry excuse for a man’s face but it barely makes him flinch, all metal.
“Johnny fuckin’ Silverhand,” the borg is laughing, voice the sound of scraping metal. “Finally came here to die. Fun little party you had at our doorstep. But you should have known it would be your last one.”
The Malorian is kicked out of his hand. Smasher lifts him up, grinning, his horrible reconstructed face filling all of Johnny’s vision along with the fat barrel of the smart gun. It’s the last thing he sees before the muzzle flashes and the bullet enters his skull.
The neon green of his UI explodes across his optics before everything goes black.
—
Somehow, diagnostics are running. His optics fizzle off, then on. An open garage door comes to him in the dark, a now out-of-production red vehicle sitting inside, clearly modded beyond reason. When he steps through it, he’s not himself.
Instead, he’s looking in a mirror, gripping the edges of a dirty shop sink, and a woman’s reflection gazes forlornly back at him. She’s familiar but Johnny can’t place just why. Behind her, the mechanic is complaining about something.
The woman rips a patch off her jacket that reads “Bakkers”, gazes at it and lets it flutter out of her—their hand. As the mechanic claims that her ride is unfixable, she clenches that fist, turns around.
The scene is cut short, clips with static to the woman’s hands adjusting the sleek black hem of a newly donned corpo blazer. She tugs the sleeves over the edge of a red and black netrunning suit, hidden under the white cuffs, Johnny still peering at this bizarre world through her eyes. But it’s also familiar—Night City towers above her, slightly different somehow, and she glances at her companion, a bulkier man with a far too friendly face, similarly dressed—or, disguised, obviously—carrying a briefcase, before nodding and ducking inside a black cab that had been idling before them.
Delamain’s blue head appears on the headrest screens, politely explaining the details of his Excelsior package to the two occupants. Johnny has no idea what the fuck is happening.
Meanwhile, the man beside him is delighted like a child on a day trip, counting every chicken this job will supposedly net them before it hatches. But the same thrilling feeling doesn’t reach whoever Johnny’s inside of. In fact, she feels like she’s gonna grind every single one of their teeth into dust in apprehension.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” the woman’s jaw somehow unlocks and her voice comes out of their stiff mouth. Johnny’s molars ache. “This gig ain’t the same as plugging into a vending machine for a few eddies, Jackie.”
“Ay, you think I don’t know that?” Jackie makes himself real comfortable on Delamain’s white leather backseat, his appreciation for luxury infectious. The woman, staring at him, trying to keep it together, finally grins and does the same.
“It’s the major leagues, Jack,” she prompts, clearly trying not to be a downer, though absolutely not feeling as bright as she sounds.
“That’s right! We’re heading to the major leagues, V!” Jackie echoes even louder, more boisterous, clearly for the hundredth time that day, and she laughs, while Johnny suddenly realizes why he recognizes her.
But they’re already moving again, getting out of the car, as nervous as new corpomilitary recruits stepping into the unfamiliar territory of the Yucatan. Arasaka Headquarters towers above them, monolithic. They make their way to the security checkpoint.
Johnny’s view of the lobby shatters into red, green, and blue broken static before reassembling into chaos.
Gunfire rains like hail on them, caught by upright beams of wood walls and splintering into thousands of pieces. V and Jackie are crouched for cover, and V is jacked into a grid of circuitry in the wall, tethered by the link cable, head snapping in a panic between where her pistol is pointing at the hallway and a massive TV on the wall that Jackie is kneeling in front of, ready to cover her at the corner.
The screen plays one obnoxious vintage Chromanticore advertisement that’s only audible when their assailants pause to reload, then cuts to Breaking News just as Jackie uses the opportunity to return fire and the wood starts exploding with bullets again. The date reads 2023, and the N54 anchor is a woman Johnny has never seen before. The news headline of the hour, juicy enough to warrant interrupting sacred advertising, reads: Arasaka Tower Under Attack: Currently On Lockdown Due To Unknown Assailants. The subtext scrolls by: Militech not claiming responsibility as of yet—
The screen shatters, pops and sparks in a tiny explosion from behind, finally shot through by the firefight, pieces raining down on Jackie’s head.
“Jackie—“ she shouts, sharply afraid, but he just waves her off, whipping out from behind their cover to fire a few rounds down the hall. The screen on her UI lights up a red [100%] and she rips out the thick, dated link cable, lets it snap back into the side of her wrist, dashing after him. Jackie is already covering the doorway, the once luxurious polished floors now decorated with tactically geared corpses and blood.
They burst into the atrium, whip past the sand and stones of that familiar rock garden before making a mad dash to elevators.
Static.
The mad dash is now across the sub-level parking lot where guards are still firing on them, apparently from behind every car, pincering them. He can see Jackie a couple yards ahead, barreling straight down an aisle to where the Delamain had screeched to a halt, black streaks burned into the concrete behind the vehicle with its doors automatically opening wide. Jackie has the foresight to run to the furthest door, lean over the roof and cover fire for V as she slams down one foot after another towards freedom, lungs pumping in overtime.
Jackie slides into his seat, shouting at Delamain to fucking gun it as she reaches her side of the car, fingertips barely landing on the rubber edge around the window at the exact moment a high caliber slug pierces her already overworked right leg, shattering a femur. As if in slow motion, Jackie makes eye contact with her just before she slams face first into the concrete beside the car, cheek scraped raw, breath bursting out of her lungs so suddenly she can’t even make a noise of pain. She lifts her torn, bloody face up before her body is even done bouncing off the pavement. The leg is just white noise on top of her already overheating brain’s endless screaming at this point. Trying desperately to flip upright with only leg and one hand, on top of backing up closer to the car, she whips her gun around to aim at whoever was pursuing them.
It’s Adam Smasher, though more meat than metal at this point in time, stalking toward them almost leisurely, an Achilles precisely aimed at her, steady, fist raised in a ceasefire command.
Jackie had thrown himself across the backseat to try and drag her in by the shoulders, shouting her name, grabbing at her blazer from behind, but she shakes him off to fire at the borg, enhanced vision precisely trained on her target as the bullets that land are uselessly deadened by the layers upon layers of armor that wraps him. She makes a decision.
The world spins violently. V rolls away from the open door. Something wet and soft and definitely flesh tears in her leg as she does it, but she chokes on a scream once and ignores it, collapses on her side, slams the backseat door shut in Jackie’s horrified face with an elbow. Gun still trained on Smasher, she slaps the side of the Delamain twice, the universal sign for go.
She hears the cab deafeningly peel out of the parking lot behind her, the heat of its engine’s roar caressing her back in a burst of warm, greasy air. Smasher doesn’t even give it a glance, just grows larger in V’s vision, crouching down to pluck the pistol out of her palm with the rifle still trained on her chest. She doesn’t fight it. V lets her empty hand drop limp to the pavement, head collapsed on her shoulder to one side, propped up weakly on one sore elbow, heart racing a thousand miles an hour.
“Five,” Smasher growls as he stands tall again, infinite cruel enjoyment in that bizarrely human voice. “You pathetic bitch. They say you’re here to accept a job offer. A shame! I was so looking forward to putting down another disobedient dog.”
“Accepting it, am I?,” she spits, shakily but still defiant. “Not the kind of headhunting you’re used to, I guess.”
“No,” Smasher barks in agreement. He grins. “But as I understand it, your head is the only part of you they’ll need.”
Her heart plummets into her stomach. He raises his massive, cybernetically enhanced boot over her good leg, and she half screams, half snarls, hand whipping out, palm splayed in a useless motion of protection, and in that split second, the optical UI flares to life, red and cyan, optics targeting Smasher’s figure, command lines running across the screen in a flash.
Smasher’s entire figure seizes up, frozen ridiculously mid-stomp while he roars in pain, body twitching, sparks flying comically from the wires that connect his cybernetic arms and legs. Smoke pours out of the joints of his kevlar armor, and V emits a feral laugh as both of them collapse into the concrete, guards rushing in to surround her.
Her laughs fade into enormous panting breaths for air.
Her vision blacks out.
—
There is a great expanse of void, illuminated only by tiny pinpricks of what he knows to be data, but feels like constellations. Amongst the blue washed lights, strung into the shape of building, of cathedral halls, a figure held together in the same way but alit in red leans against a banister surrounding a rock garden.
When he approaches, they phase away, each time he follows, their figure alternating between being hunched in an echo of grief, idleness, exhaustion. Finally, they halt in a narrow hallway, pale blue dots pressing close, back to him.
He reaches out and touches their shoulder, and a woman turns to face him.
“Who are you?” she says roughly. Her voice is both as familiar as his own, and as foreign as another language.
—
His optics reset, their endless warnings sprawling across his vision, sparking neon green and stuttering. He crawls.
And crawls.
And loses consciousness.
When he half comes to again, someone's entirely chrome arm catches the light of a nearby industrial gas burnoff, blinding him even as he's grabbed under the arms and dragged over mud and grime and broken sheets of metal. Both of the hands touching him are shining chrome. He's propped up against something, facing a dirt road, and a pair of matching shining borg legs stride hurriedly past his line of sight, momentarily blinding him again.
Everything goes black.
When he wakes up, Rogue is fishing him out of that spot in the oil fields with Santiago in the driver’s seat of a Quadra Type-66 that’s modded like a tank. She's screaming obscenities at him, cursing him for everything. But she gets him to his ripperdoc.
—
He finally wakes up days later.
The prognosis, is, of course, grim. So grim that he has only a general timeline, a neat little package of life left where at least part of it will be spent watching some long-dead solo take everything from him. He argues with Milt enough that they have to physically drag him out of the building to get him back to his apartment, the one the label bought him that he never sleeps in if he can help it.
Milt had this quiet, devastated look in his eyes as he told Johnny about the construct, explained the way it was beginning to eat his brain alive, the same look he always had when they'd talk about his son, and that only made Johnny want to punch something even more.
Two pills, red and blue. Each moving time a little differently towards something inevitable. But he’s already decided—like fuck is he going to go out on someone else’s terms.
"Those are from me," Rogue says about the psuedoendotrizine. "In case you wanna just dip. Now get some fucking rest.”
The worst thing about this is she’s not even remotely mad at him anymore. All differences and rifts between them have been replaced with this strange edge of pity, and that’s what makes him the angriest, makes every muscle in his jaw feel like it will never unclench as Rogue confirms that Alt didn’t make it. And that the bomb never went off. Probably damaged by the fall, by the rain—whatever. It’s too much info. At least the news is blaming Militech, she jokes, like it’s a safety.
He needs to shout at someone, and she’s the closest human being in proximity to him. He knows for a fact she wouldn’t hesitate to beat a dying man’s shit in if pressed the right way, and he knows exactly where all her buttons are. But he bites it all down, snuffs the need to fall even further out. His head feels like it's splitting open, his body is just not up to it, and everyone was already so sick of his bitching before this job, he doesn’t know if he has it in him to continue when he’s being carted around like a reanimated corpse, already dying again.
“Tryin’ to finish me off early, Rogue?” he jabs, gingerly setting his ass down onto the mattress, wearing more bandages than clothes.
She just scowls at him, bedside manner nonexistent. “Not like this, Johnny. Not with someone else taking over for you.”
She’s already mourning him, he can hear it in her voice. He fucking hates the honesty. It was so much easier for them to fight around whatever lies he had dumped on her.
—
He’s only been asleep for what feels like a few moments when the hallucinations start.
"Hey," the raspy, familiar voice is saying loudly, one flickering boot on the edge of his bed in the dimly lit room, hunched over him. She's all blinking lines and frayed edges. "Wake up, wake up, wake up..."
Johnny groans and rolls away from the noise, opting to rest his eyes for a second before even considering acknowledging this problem.
Unfortunately the problem appears to have different priorities.
"Look, I need to get out of here," her panicked, angry voice wakes him again and he sits up, painful and groggy. He feels like he’s been hit by a train. “Can you get the fuck up?!" she snaps.
This time she's sitting next to his bed, straddling a chair backwards that had been pulled away from a desk, both feet tapping with furious impatience. She’s fiddling with a cigarette, rolling it between fingers anxiously. And this time, when he looks at her, he truly, consciously recognizes her.
"The hell?” he says, staggering out of bed, kicking a sheet off of one foot that had been tangled. "How are you here?"
"The fuck d’you mean, 'how am I here?'," she snaps, standing up abruptly to his level. "You're the one who fuckin’ brought me here!"
He can’t believe his eyes, even as she winds up a fist and punches his lights out.
It’s the actual V, in the flesh. He’s seen pictures of her at the Afterlife on the weird little candlelit shrine behind the bar, signed napkins beside photos of famous regulars on the wall at Tom’s Diner and—hell, even one at Lizzy’s where she had been cozy with the owner.
She’s wearing the red and black netrunning suit that always peeked out from under every article of clothing, the one that he thinks, dizzyingly, inspired him to choose the same colors for Samurai. He staggers, cheekbone burning white hot in explosive pain. The sleeve of her huge vinyl jacket scrapes along his other cheek as her fist flies past it a second time. He can’t dodge the boot that collides with his fucked up ribs, though, and hits the ground on his hands and knees, the whole world glitching out, vibrating with a sickening crystalline edge. Great. He was supposedly dead days, or was it years ago? Now he’s going to die for real from a ghost beating his shit in.
“Where the fuck am I?” she spits, pacing back and forth next to him like a caged animal. “Talk or I’ll cook your brain from the inside, you piece of shit.”
Knowing how they found Saburo decades ago, he doesn’t doubt it. But Johnny grabs her by an ankle just as she begins to stalk another circle around him and she snarls as she trips, comes down hard over him, hands bracing on either side of his head. He grapples for her neck but she’s fast, shoves her palm against his before he slams it into her trachea, yet the act somehow knocks the wind out of him just as she falls back painfully onto his knees, clutching her throat and gagging as he also coughs.
They make eye contact and something terrible and strange happens. She raises one hand to reach out to him and he does the same thing, a mirror, their fingertips almost colliding. She articulates her fingers, their fingers, looking in horror as he does the same, turning their palms over and over, the criss cross of metal seams and hidden cyberware along her wrists catching the light. They both touch their respective faces at the same time, mesmerized.
“This has to be a trick,” she’s saying, voice even more desperate and raspy. “This some kind of BD rehab trick? Where am I? Did Arasaka fucking send you?”
“You fuckin’ bitch,” Johnny growls from the floor as she squats over him, staring impassively into his eyes, his face. Her tech is so old he can practically hear her optics calibrating and scanning him. He jabs one silver finger at her, then his own head. “Can't figure it out? You're in my brain."
She recoils and her hand whips up to the side of her face, her ear. “The biochip," she breathes in acknowledgement, touching gingerly. Johnny can see the color draining out of her face. "Soulkiller, I..."
“Yeah, and like hell I’m lettin' you have my body," Johnny grunts, taking the opportunity to shove V off him, her back hitting the wall, form flickering entirely out of existence for a moment. He sits up, grips her ankle again to hold her in place, but she doesn't kick, she hasn't moved from the wall, she has her face in her hands, scrubbing her eyes as if to wipe the nightmare away, shimmering figure blinking violently. He could give less of a shit. But he can touch her, and that means he can hurt her. "You wanna become Johnny fuckin’ Silverhand? I’ll kill us both before someone else gets to puppeteer me.”
“I know you will,” she says, glowing optics reappearing to glare at him between her fingertips. “I can feel it. Can also feel me pushin’ you out.”
"Yeah, luckily the doc gave me somethin’ for that," Johnny says, forcing himself to his feet even though his head and abdomen are screaming in pain, grabbing the bottle of pills off the bedstand. He cracks it open, lets them rattle into his metal palm. Holds the bottle up to her in a cheers. "See you fuckin' never, cunt."
Before he can toss back the pills, her fist slams into him, a bullseye on the bandages taped to his waist. He grunts and instantly drops to his bruised knees, doubles over facefirst into the bed, feeling at least one stitch pop and the bottle clatter beside his head.
"You piece of shit," she's snapping, phasing into position over him, standing directly on his sheets, nudging him to the side with one foot. "Do I look like I want to be you?"
Her eyes glitter as she straightens, fists clenched.
“But I’ll take what I can get.”
He reaches past her foot and grabs a spilled pill, jamming it into his mouth and flipping her off before everything goes black again.
The last thing he sees is her shaking her head.