V woke up slumped over in the shower with her hair plastered to her head and water running down her face, much the same as that first morning after she had met Johnny. After he had attacked her and she had taken the omega blockers for the first time. The only time. V didn't even know where they were now—shoved into a drawer somewhere in the apartment, but she couldn't remember exactly where.

Johnny didn't seem particularly happy with her at the moment either. Although, unlike when they'd met, he wasn't slamming her face into any windows. So that was an improvement.

"Goddammit, V, I told you not to go!" he complained from somewhere above her. "What if I hadn't come back online before that perv decided to sample the merchandise? What if I hadn't come back at all?"

V looked up at him through her eyelashes. He was leaning against the wall at the entrance to the shower. The only things she could make out through her squinted eyes were the outline of his broad shoulders and the halo of his dark hair framed against the bathroom light behind him.

"Please..." she tried to say but only managed a wordless croak. She closed her eyes and focused inward. "Please," she repeated in her mind, "don't say 'I told you so.' I know."

"I… That isn't how I meant it," he insisted.

He actually sounded halfway apologetic, which was so shocking that V was able to quiet the noise in her head (well, the other noise in her head besides Johnny) enough to focus on him instead. He looked the same as ever, except for the neutral expression on his face, which was not normal at all. He was always smirking or frowning or sneering or smiling or glowering or something. This carefully arranged mask he was wearing on his face was more terrifying than facing how furious she could feel he was, underneath the surface.

"Johnny…" began V, trailing off when she couldn't find the right words.

He took one step forward and then glitched so he was kneeling next to her. "What is it?"

More than anything in the world, V wanted to be able to say that it was nothing. What had happened had been a fluke. Normally she didn't miss anyone in her scans; usually she didn't get tased. They hadn't known that an electrical current would mess with the relic, but now they did. They could watch out for it. Take precautions. Nothing had ended up happening, other than she was scared for a few minutes.

She'd been through worse.

Getting shot in the head came to mind.

So did being attacked by the madman in her head as she dragged herself across the floor to get away.

So she didn't need him to coddle her and pretend like he wasn't mad at her. She wasn't breakable. She could handle it. She'd rather he get it out of his system now than have him pretend like everything was good between them. She could deal with Johnny's anger and his disappointment in her, but she couldn't deal with him pulling away again and leaving her to face the probable end of her life all alone.

However, as soon as she made the mistake of glancing up and meeting Johnny's dark eyes, there was no pretending that it was nothing or that she could handle it, no matter how desperately she wanted to.

V sucked in a painful breath and ducked her chin again, as if she could keep him from noticing the tears that had welled up in her eyes. That was stupid, of course; he could feel her emotions and feel the sensations of her body, even if he couldn't see her face.

"Shit!" he swore under his breath. "Jesus. Don't cry."

A chortle escaped V's sore throat, even if it was half consumed by the sob that followed right after. The slight air of terror Johnny was exuding at the sight of her tears made her feel such a rush of fond affection for him that she was almost embarrassed by it. Who'd have thunk it? Johnny Silverhand, not afraid to take on Arasaka itself, still cracking jokes and making smart-ass remarks even as he was strapped to a chair facing his own death… but felled by a crying woman.

V reached for him, nearly blindly through her tears, and ended up with a fistful of his tank top between her fingers and her other hand wrapped around his hard bicep.

"Please," she thought again into the space between them. She had probably said please more times in the past minute than she had in the entire rest of her life. "Just yell at me or, or tell me what a dumb bitch I am. But don't go."

"Where the hell do you think I'm gonna go?" he asked sharply.

"You disappeared before when you were mad at me! You didn't talk to me for days!" she accused, bordering on hysteria now.

"Fuck, V, I'm not mad at you." He sounded mildly offended, but there was no heat behind his words. "Okay, well, I am. But not like that. I'm… concerned."

Scared shitless, his mind supplied, though V doubted he had intended to think it in her direction. There was something there, just outside of V's ability to grasp it with her mind. A bad memory, and feelings of mingled fury and horror and helplessness and deep, soul-crushing guilt.

Johnny let out a long-suffering sort of sigh, as though he were making a great sacrifice, and stopped resisting the way he she was tugging on him, trying to pull him toward her.

"Alright. Fine. C'mere."

V knew that Johnny wasn't a cuddler. He didn't let people—one night stands, outputs, friends—hang off him. A hand clasped on a shoulder, holding his best friend at arm's length, that was about the extent of physical affection he was comfortable with. He loved the heat and the touch and the closeness of sex, obviously, but as soon as he came, his first instinct was to reestablish as much physical distance as he could. Part of it was his natural proclivities. Part of it was how much he disliked anyone touching his shoulder where his silver arm had been attached. And part of it was an aversion he'd developed through years of getting the shit beat out of him.

He'd never told her these things, but V knew them.

Still, he gamely let V hide her face in his neck and wrap her arms around his waist.

At first, she thought he was only allowing it because it was easier than watching her cry, and maybe that was even true. Their thoughts were so muddled together that it was difficult for her to tell what Johnny was really thinking and what she was projecting onto him. Gradually, though, his discomfort faded from their shared mind space, and his body relaxed a little so that V didn't feel like she was hugging a statue. He even wrapped his organic arm around her back, returning her hug rather than just passively letting her lean on him. Through the feedback loop between them, she got the sense that he found the embrace comforting…

No, that wasn't quite right. Comforting wasn't the word, exactly. It was more desperate than that, like he had only just now realized how starved he was for a simple touch.

He loved it and hated it at the same time.

He hated the part of himself that loved it.

They stayed that way until the warm water finally ran cold. When she could no longer ignore her own shivering, V reluctantly unlocked her arms from around Johnny's torso so that she could reach up to turn off the shower. As she had expected (and dreaded), the spell they had been under was broken by her movement. In the seconds it took V to twist the knob and turn back to him, he had already glitched himself back to a standing position, leaning against the shower wall with his arms crossed over his chest.

V was left with the sheer embarrassment of having had such a full-on breakdown, and the disappointment that the moment they had shared was over.

"Jesus, Johnny, this water bill is gonna bankrupt me," she declared, more to cover up her humiliation than for any other reason. "You couldn't have, I don't know, laid me on the bed or something?"

Fortunately, either Johnny had read her mind or he just knew her really damn well, because he didn't call her out on her bullshit.

"I dunno, V. By the time I dragged your carcass back here, it seemed like maybe I shoulda dragged it to a ripperdoc instead. You were still spasming, and the relic was acting up, and your cyberdeck was on the fritz. So I injected a couple hypos and put you under warm water to regulate your temperature and help ease you back awake. Seemed like the thing to do."

V paused at that, then tried to activate her cyberdeck. She only got a mild shock for her trouble.

"Gonna have to go see Vik after all," she muttered, more to herself than to Johnny, as she used the wall to push herself up. "Are you gonna let me change?"

They both knew that he could see her naked whenever she changed or showered. Hell, he was there when she was using the bathroom and when she was at the gynecologist and at all other personal moments in between. But usually he at least maintained the fiction that he wasn't forced to watch all of those things, by staying decidedly incorporeal while she was doing them.

"No, because you look like you're about to take a header into the wall. Do you have to go see Vik right this second? Be better to sleep it off, go first thing in the morning."

V's stomach clenched. "I don't like feeling this way," she explained, barely above a whisper. "I feel… helpless. Like my body isn't even my body."

Johnny regarded her silently for several moments, a crease appearing between his eyebrows as his dark eyes swept over her face. When he'd found whatever it was he was looking for, he shifted so that his back was against the tiles and his face was tilted up towards the ceiling.

"I get it, V. I was caught in a concussive blast once. When I came to, I couldn't feel my body. I couldn't move. My ears were ringing so loud I couldn't hear anything else. I thought 'that's it, you broke your neck, you're paralyzed.' So when I saw that my arm was just… gone. Well. It took a long time to even process what I was looking at. Then I passed out, and when I woke up they'd already implanted the chrome and pumped me full of all kinds of nerve blockers and immunosuppressants and shit. My body didn't feel like mine for a long time."

Fuck, V felt like a bitch for whining about her weak knees and not being able to use her cyberdeck.

"But you're fine," Johnny continued, as though he hadn't heard that thought. "You had a shock, your brain and your body disconnected from each other for a while. But you're fine. If you try to go to the clinic tonight, you might end up not so fine. Like dead in a ditch somewhere."

V released the breath she'd been holding in while he talked.

"Where the hell would anyone find a ditch around here?"

"Is that the point, you silly bitch?" he huffed, but the teasing note in his voice was obvious.

"No." V sighed heavily. "Yeah, okay."

Johnny lowered his chin and smiled over at her. "Try not to sound so excited. It might go to my head."

She might've laughed, or at least smiled back, except the prospect of walking from the shower to the bed was so daunting that it made her feel a little nauseated. (Yeah, she had no idea how she had thought she was going to get all the way to Vik's. She'd probably have ended up flat on her face in the hallway between her front door and the elevator, if she had even made it that far.) Even the thought of getting undressed made her limbs tremble in protest. She was seriously considering just sitting back down and sleeping in the shower in her heavy, soaked clothes, despite the fact that they were quickly cooling to room temperature and she had already started to shiver.

"Let me."

"Huh?"

"Let me take control," Johnny clarified. "I'll get you into bed, that's all. Scout's honor."

He made a strange gesture with three fingers raised and his thumb and pinky folded across his palm. V might've normally been curious about this new weirdness from him, but at the moment she was too mentally exhausted to care.

"Okay," she said instead.

Johnny jerked slightly, as if she'd hit him with something astonishing.

"Okay?" he repeated, slightly incredulous. "That's it? Just okay? No existential crisis? No dramatic speeches?"

"None," confirmed V. "I trust you."

Even if she didn't, she was too tired to fight him. If he wanted to take over, she couldn't stop him. But she did trust him, and she wasn't worried. If his goal was to take her body, he wouldn't have given it back to her in the first place.

Her first conscious experience being a passenger in her own body was… Strange didn't begin to cover what it was. Trippy didn't either, although it was both strange and trippy to see her body from a third-person perspective, as if it were someone else entirely. To watch her body move without her input. She could distantly feel the movement and the sensation of her sopping pants being dragged down her legs and the cool air hardening her exposed nipples to almost painful points. But it was like being touched through multiple layers of thick wool.

Johnny was surprisingly respectful about it. He undressed with quick, military precision, without looking down at her bare breasts or touching her inappropriately. Not even as a joke, as she had half expected.

He left the wet clothes on the shower floor to be dealt with later and limped slowly out of the bathroom, pausing for a moment to lean in the doorway. V watched in fascination as an expression that was pure Silverhand crossed over her own features as he measured the distance between him and her wardrobe. He seemed to conclude it was too far to bother, because he pivoted carefully on one leg and shuffled towards the bed, holding himself up with one hand against the wall. He only stopped long enough to grab a burrito on the way past. Synth-beef and green chilis, she noticed, not the usual synth-beef and beans V went for.

"What are you doing?" she asked, hovering over her body as he sat on the edge of the bed unwrapping the burrito.

He took a bite and let out a long, low moan, as if he'd never tasted anything better in his life. If V had been in control of the body and he had made a sound like that in his own voice, she was sure she would've been humiliated by how aroused it made her. She was fairly certain, at this point, that he made everything sound like sex just to mess with her.

After another little sigh, and with his mouth full of another bite, he informed her, "You're in bed. I kept my word. But you need to eat and I know you won't do it."

V wanted to say something snarky, but nothing immediately came to mind. He was probably right. She forgot to eat regularly even under the best of circumstances, going until her hunger was a sharp pain she couldn't ignore. And tonight was not the best of circumstances. She might hurl if she tried to take a bite herself.

Besides, Johnny hadn't eaten anything in fifty years, and he seemed to be enjoying it. Even if it was just a shitty vending machine burrito.

By the time he finally tossed the empty wrapper aside (for V to pick up later) and crawled between the sheets, V had almost gotten used to being outside of her own body. When Johnny mentally tugged her forward, exerting a gentle pressure on her mind to guide her into place, she slipped seamlessly and painlessly back into control. For longer than V would have liked to admit, it was almost as disorientating to be inside her own body and to see through her own eyes as it had been to be outside it. The friction of the sheets against her smooth skin seemed like too much. Her aching muscles seemed even worse than they had before, after only a few minutes of feeling them through the buffer of Johnny's mind.

She shuddered and closed her eyes, trying to block it out.

An unfamiliar pressure against her abdomen made V open her eyes again. She barely had time to process that Johnny was touching her, his palm pressing into her belly button and his fingers splayed across her belly, before the full weight of his arm came to rest across her waist and he settled his body behind her.

"This is your only freebie," he rumbled into her ear. "Next time we'll be fucking or nothing at all."

That was exactly the kind of jokey, dickish comment he usually made when he wanted to put some emotional distance between himself and someone else. V was content to let him get away with it, especially this time, when she felt like she could barely lift her head off her pillow.

V had foud that often in life, and in particular with Johnny, actions spoke louder than words.

The trip to Vik's was difficult, even after a full night's sleep. V normally would have walked, since it was only a few blocks away, but she still felt drained and her muscles were still spasming occasionally. Even the walk from her apartment to her car in the parking garage felt like a trek. Once she parked on Buran Street, she shuffled across the street to the side gate that led directly down to the back alley where the clinic was, rather than walking up Urmland to go through the entrance in Misty's shop. She wasn't trying to avoid Misty; she just doubted that she could make it up the street without stopping to lean on the wall.

When he caught sight of her stumbling through his door, Vik leapt from his chair and crossed the room in a few long strides. He caught her underneath the arm with one hand and wound his other arm around her waist to support her as she hobbled to his surgical chair.

"Thanks, Vik," she managed to mumble as she collapsed against the backrest.

"What the hell happened, kid?" he wanted to know.

"Got tased," she explained as briefly as possible, not wanting to give him the details. "It fritzed out the relic and my cyberdeck."

"The relic?" Vik echoed, clearly alarmed.

V blinked at him for a moment, processing the question. She hadn't really been worried about the relic, at least not since Johnny had reappeared and been as present as usual. And how fucked up was that? It hadn't crossed her mind that what had happened might fuck up the relic or mess with its ability to keep her damaged brain alive. She hadn't even considered that maybe it'd been damaged enough to kill her even quicker than otherwise. V had just been worried about losing Johnny.

"Hey, don't beat yourself up," the man himself told her as he perched on the arm of the chair. Or more ordered her, really, as was his way. "I'd make a joke about you being worried about me, but I think we both know that's just the relic working. Mold on fruit, remember?"

"That's not as comforting as you think it is, asshole," V told him with a huff, though she didn't mean a word of it.

"What?" asked Vik.

V startled and turned to look at him. She hadn't realized she'd said that out loud. She shook her head ruefully and let out a helpless chuckle.

"Sorry, Vik. Was talking to Johnny."

The expression on Vik's face did not exactly invite V to elaborate.

Fortunately, he dropped the subject without commentary, other than to remark that Johnny seemed to be alive and well (or whatever he was), and therefore the chip was still functioning at least at the most basic level. A diagnostic scan proved that to be the case and also confirmed that V's Paraline was completely beyond any hope of repair. Vik had a few models for V to pick between for an upgrade—she was well overdue for an upgrade anyway, but all her money recently had been going to do things like pay Rogue and finance the operations to find Hellman and Evelyn. Her Kiroshis had avoided any permanent damage, but Vik did have to reset them.

"Oughta get some subdermal armor," chimed in Johnny as V was making her selections. "Maybe a health booster."

"You know I don't wanna get chromed out. I only want the necessities," V reminded him.

"If you ask me, armor is a necessity," he told her. V couldn't read any concern in his tone, which was as irreverent as ever, as if he really didn't give a shit and couldn't have explained why he had bothered to say anything if she had asked. But she could feel his worry, underneath the surface. "Maybe it'll keep you alive if I can't," he pointed out. "Ask if there's something with electrical resistance."

"Johnny, baby, I can't afford it right now."

It was a testament to how truly worried he was that he didn't even make a token objection to being called 'baby'. He only crossed his arms and leaned back against the back of the chair next to her, his organic bicep pressing against her shoulder. If it'd been anyone else, she would have accused them of sulking, or maybe pouting. Neither of those things seemed to apply to Johnny, even if they were exactly what he was doing.

On the plus side, he didn't disappear. The warmth of his arm pressed into hers was a welcome comfort, even if his annoyance felt like a bee buzzing around V's head.

He did have a point, though. V wasn't into unnecessary chrome. She couldn't imagine having her own healthy limbs amputated and replaced with metal and plastic, not even if she would get massive benefits to her hacking or combat abilities. The Kiroshis had almost been a step too far for her, but she hadn't felt like she had a choice with those, if she wanted to do big-time merc work. Subdermal armor didn't really replace any living tissue, though, just added to what was already there. And you couldn't tell someone had it just from looking. Maybe it'd have prevented what happened in the server room.

"I'm not saying no," she assured the brooding rockerboy. V reached up to press her hand into his leg, between his knee and thigh. "Next time I come into enough eddies, I'll come back for it."

"I don't know why you're strapped for cash now," he grumbled. "Didn't the fixer pay you for the last job?"

"What job?"

Johnny's silence and the expressive look on his face were all the answer she received, but it was enough. She realized with a start that he meant the job she'd just done, the one that had gone sideways. V twisted in her seat to face him more fully.

"You finished the gig?"

"Of course I did," he said as if it weren't a big deal. "I'm not an amateur. And you'd already done most of the work anyway. All I had to do was upload the virus."

V tried to organize her thoughts and her feelings into something coherent. She hadn't asked before—she had been too focused on recovering to think about what exactly had happened after she had lost consciousness, and on some level she sort of hadn't wanted to reopen the wound by asking. Johnny had killed the guy, surely. She could guess that much. But now that he'd brought up what had happened in the basement of the H11 megabuilding, V couldn't help but wonder.

"Not much to tell," he informed her without waiting for her to ask. She was grateful for his ability to hear her thoughts in this instance, because if it had been up to her to ask, they'd probably have never talked about it. "That rapist motherfucker wasn't expecting you to be able to fight back, so he let his guard down. Kept his taser right there on his belt when he reached down to take your tits out. So I used it to give him a taste of his own medicine."

V could have puked at the thought of what might have happened. If she let herself dwell on it, she would. She did her best to shove it to the back of her mind.

"Did you kill him?" she asked, certain that he had but just… needing to know for sure.

"As a matter of fact, no." Johnny held up his hand to forestall the outburst V was definitely about to unleash on him. "Like I told you, V, there are fates worse than death. I stomped his cock and balls into a pulp."

"You what?"

"You heard me. The perv will just have to live with his memories of what it feels like to have a dick. If he doesn't put a bullet in his own brain at the first opportunity."

V could only look at him, mouth agape.

"What?" he challenged, as if he didn't know.

He was a real piece of work. V had always known that. Who set off a nuclear bomb in a skyscraper? An occupied skyscraper? In the middle of one of the densest urban centers in the country? A complete fucking monster, that's who. But he was her monster—as much as anyone could claim to own Johnny Silverhand in any way—and somewhere along the way she had forgotten how extreme he was. How he could justify literally insane actions. Emasculating rapists was hardly on the same level as detonating a nuclear bomb in a population center, but V had never been a fan of torture. She killed when she needed to for a job or when someone was trying to kill her or someone else. She wasn't a saint; she didn't leave her enemies alive, even when taking them out non-fatally was an option. But she tried to make it quick and clean.

V didn't think that she would have tortured the Tyger Claw even if she'd been able to. Even if he had raped her. She'd have just wanted to kill him. Or at least she hoped that she wouldn't want to make him suffer just because she could.

On the other hand, she wasn't exactly sad about it. She felt like she should be. She was shocked to hear what Johnny had done, that much was true. She knew she should be horrified and disgusted and angry. But she… was not. She was more horrified that she didn't feel what she thought she should.

"Uh… V?" came a nearby voice, and V remembered suddenly that they weren't alone.

They were, in fact, still in Vik's clinic, and he was still waiting for her to make her selections so he could work his magic. She turned her head to look at the man's concerned, nearly anxious expression and followed his eyes to where her hand was still resting on Johnny's leg. How must it look to him? To V, it looked completely normal. To everyone else, it must look like she was talking to thin air and trying to touch imaginary objects. (She didn't even know how much of their conversation she had spoken out loud.)

Slowly, as if it weren't a big deal, V pulled her hand back into her own lap. She offered Viktor the most convincing smile she could muster up.

"Sorry, doc. Sometimes I forget that no one else can see or hear him."

That was a complete lie. V never, not for one second, ever forgot their situation. But it would've sounded even crazier for her to say that she was fully aware of it but just sometimes forgot where she was or who was around when she was talking to Johnny. Shit, one of these days she was going to end up getting involuntarily committed to the psych ward for talking to him in public.

"When you said you could talk to him, I didn't think you meant… this. It almost sounds like you're… friends."

Well, then again, it was going to sound crazy to Vik no matter which way she tried to slice it. The way he had said that clearly conveyed his disapproval. His disgust with the idea that V could actually like Johnny.

"Uh—yeah." A nervous little laugh escaped V's throat, although she didn't know why exactly it made her nervous. It wasn't like Viktor could do anything about it other than talk at her about how weird it was that she was becoming friends with her very own tapeworm. "We're together all the time, Vik," she continued more firmly, the look of mild horror on his face making her feel like she had to justify herself. "Isn't it a good thing that we get along? Isn't it better than the alternative?"

"Just tell him to fuck off," Johnny ordered in the same matter-of-factly callous tone V was used to hearing whenever he thought someone was beneath his notice. "It's none of his business."

"You're not helping," V told him, careful to think it instead of say it aloud this time.

"Shit," Vik swore. "No, V, I don't think it's a good thing that you've made friends with the terrorist who's erasing your consciousness. What could you possibly have to talk about with Hans Gruber anyway?"

"Who?"

"Ask the terrorist," replied the ripperdoc.

V looked back at Johnny, but he only shrugged and gave her a confused look. "Beats me. Got no fucking clue."

When V relayed this to Vik, the older man looked flabbergasted. He sat back in his rolling chair and crossed his arms over his chest.

"Die Hard?" he began. At V's uncomprehending look and Johnny's silence, he continued, "Bruce Willis? Alan Rickman? Terrorists take over an office tower on Christmas Eve and blow it up? You can't tell me that someone older than me doesn't know Die Hard."

"Oh. Right. I've heard of it. I remember Ker and Nance arguing once over whether it's a Christmas movie. But I never saw it." Vik was, again, surprised to hear what Johnny had to say, as relayed by V. Johnny shrugged again. "I dunno what he wants me to say. It was already an old movie by the time I was old enough to see it. I think it came out around the year I was born. And after Nicaragua I wasn't interested in watching war or action movies."

Vik seemed prepared to immediately lob out a retort, but he stopped, lips parted and head tilted in confusion.

"Can see the hamster spinnin'," Johnny remarked, clearly unimpressed.

V had no idea what that meant.

Before she had time to ask, the older man demanded, "How can he have been born when that film came out? That was '88 or '89. Timeline's not adding up."

"Fifteen," said Johnny flatly, without further context.

For Vik's benefit, V asked aloud, "What d'ya mean 'fifteen'? Fifteen what?"

"Years old." After a beat, he added, "When I joined the army."

"What?" exclaimed V. History was absolutely not her strong suit, so she hadn't put the pieces together when she had found out how old he was when he died. That was horrific. It was insane.

"Barely seventeen when I lost the arm," Johnny continued smoothly, as if he weren't completely rewriting V's view of the world. "Still seventeen when I deserted."

"Johnny…" V began.

But she didn't know what to say to that, especially not with Vik watching. Even if the child soldier turned deserter turned rockerboy turned vigilante turned terrorist was willing to accept her comfort, which wasn't his M.O. at all, he wouldn't accept it in front of Viktor.

"He joined up at fifteen?" Vik guessed from what V had said aloud during her exchange with Johnny. "A lot of kids lied about their ages. The corps didn't care to check; they just needed bodies…. You know, that actually explains a lot. A kid getting implanted with a chrome arm? Back then, when the tech was still new? Silverhand was probably a cyberpsycho before we had a word for it."

"Fuck you!" growled Johnny, sounding actually offended by what Vik had said. He turned his scowl on V. "Tell him I said to go fuck himself."

"He still hasn't fixed me up. And I don't really want to find another ripper," V reminded him gently, but she was almost as angry as he was. How dare Vik try to diagnose Johnny when he'd never even met him, let alone had a conversation with him or performed any sort of medical evaluation? And why go straight for cyberpsychosis, as if the trauma of the things he'd seen and what had happened to him wouldn't have sent men three times his age into some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, even without being forcibly implanted with a cybernetic arm?

All of these thoughts she let Johnny access freely, determined that he know she was on his side, even if she didn't think it was the best idea to alienate Vik before he got her outfitted with a new cyberdeck at the very least.

Johnny let out an aggressive huff and crossed his arms over his chest, but he didn't have an argument against that. Or at least not one he cared to make. He didn't disappear either, which made V's heart skip a beat. She tried her best not to read too much into it, but she couldn't help it.

"That's not fair, Vik," V settled on saying. She managed to keep her tone even and free of most of the anger she felt on Johnny's behalf (not to mention the deep well of indignation she was getting from Johnny himself). "Johnny's a whole person, not a meme or a couple of facts you can boil down like that without even knowing the guy."

Vik's forehead creased in the middle, his thick eyebrows drawn low into a frown.

"I lived through what he did. I know enough about him to be worried that you're getting friendly with the thing overwriting your psyche. I have to wonder how much of that is because you actually get along with a terrorist and how much of it is just the relic doing its job." He sighed heavily and shook his head. "Between the two of those, I honestly don't know which is worse."