Author's Notes: This is an AU based on the question "What if V and Johnny could have physically touched each other?". Yeah, I know they can't in the game, it doesn't make sense, etc. But what if they could?
Some things, ranging from missions to plotlines to dialogue, will deviate more from canon than others. This focuses more on the relationship between V and Johnny and less on the action. (We've all played the game/seen the action anyway, right?)
They were supposed to be having a relaxing night in, a well-deserved rest after the hectic few days they'd had chasing down Hellman. Things had been going nonstop from the time they'd met Panam: helping her recover her ride, helping her get revenge on the gonks who had screwed her over, taking down the Kang Tao transport, trying to save Mitch and Scorpion, chasing the corpo swine across the desert, interrogating Hellman… And all of that with only one abbreviated night of rest in a run-down hick hotel. After their chat outside, Johnny had wanted to rent another room and sleep it off before heading home. V had insisted they come home before they finally crashed, so they could shut themselves inside their apartment for as long as they wanted without being disturbed.
Only now V was lying in bed staring up at the lights flashing across her ceiling from outside the window, unable to sleep. She was about as far from relaxed as it was possible to be, outside of actual combat.
The thing was she couldn't stop thinking about what Johnny had said about her. The rest of the conversation had been, just, whatever. She agreed with his general points about corporations fucking people over. (How could she not?) She thought his crusade had a lot more to do with some personal shit she didn't know about yet, and less to do with grand ideals about helping other people, than he was willing to admit. But it was true that their goals aligned well, regardless of his motivations. Overall, she thought the conversation had gone about as well as it could have.
But what he'd said about her… Well, V couldn't fathom why, exactly, she cared so much about what the parasite in her head thought of her, but it was obvious that she did care about it. A lot.
"Johnny?" she called his name into the empty room, voice rough with emotion and lack of sleep.
It was a force of habit to speak to him out loud, though she knew she didn't need to. The air at the foot of her bed shimmered for several seconds until he materialized, leaning against the wall with his legs sprawled out next to her body. She wasn't the only one with habits. He could talk to her inside her head, if he wanted to, but he almost always gave himself physical form for their little chats.
"Thank fuck," he said snidely, with extra feeling behind it. "I was starting to think you planned on spending the whole night agonizing over shit instead of talking it out so we can go to fucking sleep."
V scoffed. "You could've been the one to say something!"
"Nah," he denied, "I'm not enough of a masochist to invite a woman to talk to me about her feelings."
V reached out automatically to give him a half playful, half chastising slap on the thigh. She felt silly immediately, as soon as she moved, because of course she couldn't touch him. He was only a hallucination. Then her palm made contact with the smooth leather of his pants. He didn't react, other than to raise his eyebrows at the sight of her hand resting on his upper thigh. V yanked her arm back as though she'd been burned.
"Well? Are you gonna spit it out?" challenged Johnny, after long seconds of uncomfortable silence.
And yeah, he had the right idea. V was so not ready to think about the fact that she could actually touch the ghost in her mind. Much less to talk about it. Fuck that.
"It's about what you said," she blurted out, speaking quickly, too eager to shift the subject to anything besides the warmth of his thigh underneath her hand.
His eyebrow arched up a titch higher. "I say a lot of shit. Anything in particular?"
"That I'm just a corpocog. That I'm replaceable."
"Ah," he acknowledged. He appeared vaguely uncomfortable, although V wouldn't have dared say he looked apologetic. She very much doubted he was actually sorry about what he'd said, even if he regretted that he had to talk it out with her now. "Look," he began slowly, clearly reluctantly, "you were right: I'm an asshole."
V suddenly felt too vulnerable to lie down in front of him. She pushed herself up so she was in a sitting position, hugging her knees to her chest. They were much closer to each other this way, though, an unexpected and somewhat unwelcome consequence. From her new position, the faint crow's feet around his eyes and the beginnings of lines across his forehead, no doubt from all the eyebrow action, were readily apparent. She wanted to reach out and touch him again. Instead, she let out a sigh.
"You're not wrong about me, Johnny. I'm not looking for an apology or whatever the fuck that was supposed to be," she told him, to his clear surprise and disbelief. "It's just… How many of those flashes of my past have you had?"
He blinked at her, once, twice, then frowned as he sat up straighter against the wall.
"Mostly more recent ones, I think. I reckon I know pretty much everything about the heist you planned to steal the chip. I've got a lot of the stuff you did with Jackie before the heist, and most of the shit with that Jenkins asshole. Further back it's mostly hazy impressions."
"So you know why I got terminated," V confirmed with another sigh. "Do you know why I joined Arasaka in the first place?"
The flat expression on his face, broken up only by his pursed lips, was all the evidence V needed to conclude he had no interest in discussing this. That he'd rather be anywhere else, save back in an Arasaka lab. He obliged by shaking his head in response to her question, but he was so unhappy about it that V almost giggled at the sulky look on his face. He couldn't escape her or this conversation even if he wanted to. But he could disappear back into her head, and somehow she couldn't imagine telling Johnny this without seeing him face-to-face. So, before he had a chance to change his mind, V started talking.
"My parents work for Arasaka. They're both only mid-level—Mom's an account manager at Arasaka Bank, and Dad's been an engineer in the cyberware manufacturing division for close to thirty years. It was all I ever knew, you know?"
Johnny made a noise that wasn't a word. But it definitely sounded like he could have turned it into a "Shit!" if he had wanted to admit he felt a little bit bad about what he'd said to her. Which he didn't, obviously.
"It was a good life, Johnny. The best, looking back on it now," she emphasized, catching his dark eyes with her own green ones. "We weren't rich, but we were better off than seventy-five percent of people in Night City. Had a nice apartment in Charter Hill where my brother and me had our own bedrooms. Nice clothes, decent school, good food to eat. I wanted it all for myself—a husband who loved me, fat babies I could afford to take care of, a nice home and nice things—only I wanted more. Always more. If my parents had an apartment in Charter Hill, then I wanted a mansion in North Oak. If they sent me to the 'Saka-funded school, then I wanted to be able to send my kids to the fanciest private school in the city."
"So you did what you had to do to wind up in the counterintelligence division and keep moving up the corpo ladder," Johnny concluded for her.
He didn't sound pleased or even understanding, but he also didn't sound angry or disgusted. V counted that as a win, to put it mildly. Hell, considering who and what Johnny was, neutral acceptance was a major victory. On a scale from beating someone half to death for no reason to setting off a nuclear bomb in Arasaka Tower, this reaction didn't register a blip on the Johnny Silverhand Richter scale.
"Yeah," she agreed. "I killed some people personally. Ordered others to be killed. But it was all my fellow corpos, all people who knew what they had signed up for, same as me. I never saw any of the farmers or little people you saw getting fucked over by corps during the war, or else I'd have probably had a change of heart like yours. At least I hope I would have."
V hugged her legs tighter against her chest and let her chin drop to rest on her knees as she watched him watch her. He didn't say anything for a long time, and his stare was so intense it made her want to roll over and pull the covers over her head like a child.
Finally, something in his expression shifted, so slightly she wouldn't have noticed it if she hadn't been staring at his face so intently.
"I think you would have," he said, more seriously than she'd ever heard him say anything.
"Yeah?" she asked hopefully, perking up enough to lift her head.
"Sure. You're not a fucking sociopath."
That was not exactly a resounding endorsement. V was grateful for it anyway, if it meant Johnny had at least stopped lumping her in with all the nameless, faceless corpocogs he despised.
Then, just when V felt the tension begin to leave her body at his seeming acceptance, he added, "I think you would've walked away from the corpo life eventually anyway, even if you hadn't been fired. I felt how reluctant you were to kill Abernathy, and not only because you were afraid of what'd happen to you if anyone found out."
V's lips parted in surprise, but she couldn't think of anything to actually say.
"Course," he continued with a smirk, "you shouldn't have hesitated for a second to kill that corpo cunt when you had the chance. You're kind of a pussy."
V couldn't stop the surprised bark of laughter that escaped her throat.
"Maybe I should've nuked the whole building when I had the chance," she asserted half-seriously and offered him a grin.
A smile tugged at the corners of Johnny's mouth. "Now there's an idea."
Things kept rolling forward, as things are wont to do, and Johnny and V never expressly mentioned their late-night conversation about V's past again. For V's part, she had exactly zero desire to revisit the subject, both because it was unpleasant for her to think about her past (and her family) and because she didn't want to risk alienating Johnny. They had started getting along so well, now that V wasn't actively resentful of his presence and he wasn't actively trying to kill her. She had come to rely on his dry, often dark humor and irreverent commentary to get her through each day. As for Johnny's reasons, V could only guess—it was unfair and downright annoying that Johnny so easily accessed V's inner thoughts, but by comparison his were practically a closed book to her.
When they met Takemura in Japantown, Johnny was not pleased with the former corpo agent's plan or, for that matter, his continued existence. Once they left Goro behind, he went off about working with 'Saka scum and the evils of Arasaka specifically and some general anti-capitalist stuff.
After about the fourth minute of his rant, V interjected, "It was your idea to use the man and then snuff him after!"
"Yeah, 'cept you aren't plannin' on killing the motherfucker! I can hear your thoughts, V. It's like being in some fucked up brainwashing program for your pussyfooting goddamn bullshit."
"We don't have to murder the guy in cold blood just because he used to work for Arasaka," pointed out V, imminently reasonably in her opinion.
"He's trying to use you as a bargaining chip to earn his way back into Arasaka!" Johnny exploded. "And you're LETTING HIM! Fuck's sake, V, you're seriously considering whether Hanako fucking Arasaka can help us!"
"She might be able to help! I'm trying to explore every option!" V defended herself.
Johnny's rage was a tangible thing. It felt somehow like V's own, if she were having an out-of-body experience. But at the same time, it was clearly entirely separate from her, threatening to crash over her and drag her out into a sea of fury and unhealed hurts until she drowned in them. She had always understood why everyone seemed either to be afraid of Johnny or to be in awe of him, or both, and she knew firsthand that it was not just the exaggeration of a legend over time. But for the first time since that first night together, V actually felt afraid of him.
"Do you not hear how stupid you sound?" Johnny demanded, his tone cold and cruel. "Takemura has exactly zero interest in helping you beyond clearing his own name. And Hanako will care less about you than her dog does. She'll want to recover me—their precious fucking tech—and then, best case scenario, she'll give you to her goons to lock up in some far-flung 'Saka lab to experiment on."
"That'd be better than dying!" cried V, who felt like she was on the verge of actually bursting into tears in the middle of the sidewalk.
Johnny's face, which had been so full of anger only moments before, closed off entirely. When he caught her in a stare, his dark eyes looked almost dead, like how V imagined a shark's must seem.
"Jesus fucking Christ, I keep forgetting how young you are," he muttered, almost more to himself than to her. "There's a lot worse things than death, kid, and I'm the world's leading expert on the subject."
His words made something in V's stomach feel like it had been hollowed out. Because yeah, he was right, and she knew it. She was grasping blindly at every straw anyone presented to her, or even at things that seemed like they might turn into straws somehow, to save her own life. But did she really want to survive at any cost, if it meant ending up in a life not worth living? Plus, she felt like a huge bitch for trying so hard to save herself at Johnny's expense. It might not be fair that he was slowly killing her, and she may want to live, and she may not have any other choice in the end besides deleting Johnny, but it wasn't his fault that he'd ended up as an engram jacked into her port right before she got shot in the head. And it couldn't be anymore fun for him to think about his potential death (for good this time) than it was for V to think about hers.
"Never fucking mind. I don't know why I bother," he snarled, lips curling into a sneer. "Guess I just thought you of all people would understand that corpo rats don't give a shit about you."
He disappeared before V could respond.
She could've talked to him in her head, but the disappearing act meant that he was done talking. V could respect that. She had no idea what to say anyway. I'm sorry seemed so inadequate. You're right would go over better with Johnny. However, despite everything, V wasn't ready yet to give up completely on Takemura's plan, and that's what would be important to Johnny.
They didn't speak again for almost three days. Johnny didn't even show up when V was doing a job involving a joytoy who had gotten in over her head, which normally would have been highly appealing to him. She hadn't thought he'd be able to resist the opportunity to make mean jokes about whores, but he had proven her wrong.
V was shocked at how much she missed him and his caustic remarks.
She did hear his voice once, when she was helping a half naked man get to a ripperdoc to see about his malfunctioning cock implant. Or, well, at least she heard his uncontrollable laughter and eventually his wheezing gasps for air. It had made it incredibly difficult for V not to laugh at the poor, suffering man in her passenger seat.
When Johnny deigned to show up in person again, it was to hover over Evelyn Parker's prone form as Judy rapidly gave instructions. He glared through narrowed eyes at Evelyn's body, critically cataloguing every hair and bruise and twitch.
V stood frozen on the other side of the room, trying not to throw up. The place smelled like damp and sex and piss, and it didn't look any prettier than it smelled. Evelyn wasn't faring much better. V was not horrified so much by the state of the other woman as by her inner voice telling her over and over that this was yet another dead end, that she was going to die and nobody could save her. She realized that was selfish. Really, she did. She just could not muster up the ability to care right at that moment.
"V!" cried Judy, sounding as though she were far away though it couldn't have been more than thirty feet. "V, come on, you've got to help me disconnect her!"
Johnny waved his hand in Evelyn's direction. "C'mon, V. Rip that fucking jack out of her head and splash some water on her face or something."
"Jesus, Johnny, she's unconscious," V objected, but there was no real heat behind it.
"Got two functioning eyes, sweetheart," he said dismissively, though he finally dragged said eyes away from Evelyn to look at V instead. The combination of the endearment (though she knew he didn't mean anything by it) and his piercing dark eyes finally on her again after so many days without him was enough to make V's heartrate increase. "I'm saying let's wake the whore up."
V's first impulse was to snap at him to not call Evelyn a whore, but honestly, she didn't care enough about Evelyn to challenge Johnny on the doll's behalf. Based on his smirk, she figured he'd been privy to that thought.
Still, V didn't feel like she could try to wake Evelyn up or question her with Judy right there freaking out, so she didn't. Johnny was blessedly silent on the subject as V and Judy worked together to haul Evelyn's dead weight to the elevator and into the van, then later into Judy's apartment. V didn't think she could have handled hearing him chastise her again for being stupid.
Although, she thought to herself as she all-but collapsed against the stair rail outside the apartment, trying to catch her breath, if he'd been able to carry Evelyn up the stairs for me, I would have put up with anything he wanted to say to me, however he wanted to say it.
"Even if I could've, I wouldn't've," his rough voice broke into her thoughts.
V turned to look at him. He was leaning backwards, his elbows braced against the railing and his head tilted back as if the sky in Night City was anything worth seeing.
"Why not?" she wondered, genuinely curious. "Too good to help out a doll?"
She couldn't see past his aviators, but V got the distinct impression that he had rolled his eyes.
"I don't give a damn what she does with her body. But this"—he waved his chrome hand vaguely between the two of them—"is her fault, and now she's worse than useless to us. The only help she'd ever get from me is a bullet to the brain. If I wanted to get revenge, I'd leave her alive like she is now."
That was harsh, but it was pure Silverhand. V couldn't be mad at it.
However, she did have to ask, "How exactly is it her fault? She brought Dex the job, sure, but she couldn't have known that the goddamn emperor would visit the same day we broke into the penthouse."
Johnny snorted contemptuously. "She's a liar and a traitor, that's how. You really think hazing Dex was out of character for her? Or that she found out about the relic and came up with the plan to scroll a virtu in her own little whore head? Nah, dollars to donuts someone else came up with the plan and hired her to get them intel, and she hazed them and brought the op to Dex without knowing the full fucking context."
V hadn't put the dots together like that before, but now that Johnny had pointed it out, she couldn't help but agree that was likely the case. She had asked Evelyn a ton of questions about how she'd gotten her intel and about Yorinobu himself, and all of them had turned out to be the wrong questions to ask. Still, one specific thing Johnny had said caught her attention above the others, and she was dying of curiosity.
"Dollars to donuts?"
He scoffed, but a smile threatened to crack the serious lines of his face. "I give you some preem insights, and that's what you take away from it?"
"You bet it is," confirmed V, who was working hard to keep her own expression straight. "What, were you born in the 1960s?"
"Eighty-eight, thank you very much. As if you know anything about the sixties or the eighties."
V blinked rapidly up at him as she did the mental calculations. "You were… thirty-five?"
"Thirty-four," corrected Johnny, much quieter than usual.
Shit!
V reached for him without thinking. She was just as surprised as he was, though likely for different reasons, when her palm landed on his shoulder at the seam where chrome met flesh. Even though she had touched him before—even though he had touched her before, that first night when he had tossed her around her apartment—V still hadn't expected it to work. All their prior physical contact had been brief, but this time she wrapped her hand around his shoulder and gently squeezed his flesh with her fingers, out of equal parts curiosity and a desire to offer him comfort. The prolonged contact allowed her to notice for the first time that touching him produced a feedback loop; she could feel his muscles and warm skin and cool metal beneath her hand, but at the same time she could feel a phantom hand squeezing her own shoulder.
Johnny shrugged out from beneath her touch without saying a word. Before V could worry that she had done something to mortally offend him, he turned around so that they were facing the same direction, looking out over the parking lot, and leaned forward next to her. His organic arm pressed in tight against hers.
"I need a smoke," he declared, and V recognized it as both a change of subject away from his death and a clear diversion away from the potential subject of their touching.
"Jooohnnyyy…" she drew out both syllables of his name, not at all caring how whiny she was being. "They're gross."
"C'mon, just one! Please? You can't make an addict go cold turkey like this."
V pulled out Evelyn's cigarette case and turned it over in her hands, considering. Were her weird cravings and headaches and upset stomach actually Johnny's? She had thought they were just side effects of the biochip or of the stress of the entire situation. However, she had felt his anger earlier, and she had felt his humor when she had helped flaming crotch guy. Their sensations were mirrored when they came into physical contact with each other. It didn't seem outside the realm of possibility that she could also experience his nicotine withdrawal.
Shit! she thought again. This really sucks!
Out loud, she said, "Ugh, fine! But I swear to god, if I get lung cancer or emphysema, I will kill you."
She felt him shrug against her shoulder.
"If you do, you can just get a new set of lungs. No big deal," he pointed out. A beat later, after V had taken her first drag, he said loudly, over the sound of her hacking cough, "Ah, finally! Something to smell other than exhaust and the stench of the city."
V had smoked one cigarette down to the filter and was halfway through a second when Judy finally stuck her head out of the storm door and said V was good to come inside. She had no idea what Judy had been doing with Evelyn that could have taken so long, but it was worth the wait when she showed V two BDs she had pulled from Evelyn's fried implant.
Of course, helpful as it was, the news wasn't exactly good.
"Motherfucker!" Johnny swore as soon as Judy had left the room, her mind clearly still spinning with the concept of biochips and personality constructs.
V sat back in her rickety chair as she watched Johnny glitch around the room. Anybody with eyes or ears could have seen he was furious, but V felt a deeper despair underlying his anger. And, if she was reading him right, a sense of mingled grief and guilt. She was so taken aback that she couldn't even find it within herself to be annoyed that the smell of tobacco clogged her nose from the cigarette he was sucking on as if his life depended on it, despite it not being real.
He glitched across the room a final time, then settled his arms against the window frame and let his head hang down between his shoulders.
V chewed on the inside of her cheek as she tried to work out the best way to ask him. In the end, she settled for the simple, direct approach.
"These people—what could they want from Alt?"
"How the hell should I know?" he demanded, voice half an octave higher than usual but twice as gritty.
V swallowed around the lump in her throat. "You've got no notion whatsoever?"
Johnny let his head fall forward that much further, until his hair was shielding his face from her view. "It doesn't matter," he asserted flatly. "One way or another, everything leads back to that netrunner. We've gotta find her—if she knows as much as I think she does about the chip, she'll be able to help us."
It would have been easy for V to let her frustration take over. Johnny was withholding information from her, and she didn't appreciate the way he was dodging her question. She would've been fully justified if she got mad at him. But she couldn't shake the feeling of anguish underlying his actions. It didn't feel right to be angry or to attack him when he was already dealing himself a healthy dose of self-flagellation.
V approached cautiously, giving him a chance to leave if he wanted. He did not.
"But you did know Alt," she said softly. It was a statement, not a question.
Johnny audibly released a great breath of air, as if V had punched him directly in the diaphragm. There was no room at the window for V to slide in next to him, and he had made clear earlier that he didn't like her touching his shoulder with the silver arm. His bullet proof vest had ridden up when he hunched over, so V reached out instead to smooth small circles across his exposed lower back. He went into full rigor mortis for the space of half a dozen heartbeats, but she didn't let up, and eventually he relaxed and breathed in deeply, then out again.
"Yeah," he croaked out his confirmation.
"Okay," replied V, still rubbing her fingers into his tense muscles. "I won't push. I trust you to tell me if I need to know."
She had no idea when she had started trusting Johnny like that, but she did. Maybe his code had just overwritten enough of her mind in the last several weeks to make her think it was a good idea. After all, she should, by all rights and common sense, not trust a single word he said (or chose to withhold) about finding a potential cure that would result in his own death. Hell, she should also be terrified of the revelation that they could physically interact with each other at will, given the last time he had initiated contact it had been to smack her around and try to crack her skull against a window. And given that he had displayed the same ferocious anger and scared her shitless only a few days before.
However, despite how stupid and masochistic it was, she did trust Johnny and she liked the idea that they could touch.
Even if her extreme chill about the situation was probably a result of the biochip erasing her own psyche and replacing it with his.