A/N: This is just pointless drabble. I don't own "Neuromancer."
Henry Dorset Case's mind was mostly gone, and he was mostly okay with that. Just another thing he didn't really need, like his drugs and his deck. Even the people who'd come and gone, dipping in and out of his life. Michael, Ratz, Molly, Linda, Bobby Quinne and McCoy Pauley… Awful thing to say, that you didn't "need" your wife, or your lost lover, your old friends, but the truth was he didn't. Loved them, without a doubt, but didn't need them. Case was a firm believer, by now, in the phrase "life goes on."
Other folks at the home bitched about their ungrateful kids not visiting enough, but between four spawn and five grandkids, Case had about all the attention he could take. Sometimes, he'd wish for a visit from one of the three women he wouldn't ever see again. Linda, Molly, Michael. One, to apologize for abandoning her; one, to ask why she'd abandoned him; and one, just to have her company.
Case would've never in a billion years guessed he'd end up marrying Michael. She was just supposed to be a fling, a rebound after Molly took off. She'd served him in a bar, when he returned home to the Sprawl. She wasn't the tragic damsel Linda had been to him, and she wasn't a warrior goddess of the street like Molly. She was essentially Case with tits: a woman with a long and embarrassing past, riddled with lost lovers and drug addictions and sketchy allegiances. She was a couple years older than Case, and had bags around her eyes, but her eyes were a clear coffee brown, and he found them more endearing every day he was with her. They eloped in Jersey, a tiny private union held in the back of a holo-arcade. Their honeymoon took place in a cheap hotel that seemed like the Hilton next to the coffins Case had gotten used to in Chiba. He'd found a quasi-legitimate job punching deck, and Michael continued working at the bar. There was a funny story behind why she had taken the name Michael, a boy's name, but ninety-eight-year-old Case couldn't remember it anymore.
He realized he must be asleep and dreaming now, because his wife was here in front of him, looking at him over the bar counter, her mouth pursed in that tight sarcastic smile. Outside the bar's window was the silver beach, and on the bar counter, the shuriken Molly had bought him in Chiba, weighing down her note. Just the way I'm wired.
A/N: It's canon that Case got married and had four kids (as said in "Mona Lisa Overdrive"), and "Neuromancer" ends with Case hooking up with "a girl who called herself Michael."