Chapter Text
In the fetid air of the abandoned trailer, Jackie Welles is just slightly too big for the couch he’s on. It’s sun bleached red, the springs having long since busted out the bottom. In retrospect, the desert has never looked this bleached out before.
But it’s not just the desert. The city, after its initial sparkle, fades too. In the immediate radius of Jackie Welles, everything else fades into the background.
That’s how V remembers it.
Their meeting is a tape he likes to play again and again for Johnny. Not that Johnny really has a choice. Johnny’s seen it so many times he complains mostly about his driving in it now, the way he almost takes the Rattler over the median when they’re escaping Arasaka goons zeroing in on the freeze-dried illegal iguana in the back.
Jackie is the sun; he lights V’s world like an atom bomb, supernova. Jackie Welles is booming and honest, strength in character and stature. His frankness was teasing without being caustic. Nobody had been like that in V’s clan. He could not have ever imagined someone who shines like that to come from the backwater barren waste of a Raffen Shiv hole he had crawled from.
V does not have many memories to choose from that don’t in some way involve Jackie. V has forgotten many; been like this for years before, though maybe it’s gotten worst since Johnny’s moved into his head.
Tonight, though, V is feeling morose, and self-pitying, and all of those other lovely emotions he’d much rather drown in a bottle or silence with violence. A holdover from the disappointing date Johnny had with Rouge last week, V rationalizes, the way the barrier between them recently has been feeling more sieve than solid.
So he doesn’t play their first meeting; he plays the memory of the heist.
Nerves running high, V compulsively mouths off, butts heads with Jackie in the cab. Jackie looked so fucking good in that suit; like suicide doors on a Quadra Type-66, the feel of a shotgun kicking back straight into his ribs. He wants to put a hand on his leg, but Delamain’s face staring at them from the rearview mirror kills any ability to follow through with the idea. And by the time they step into the hotel, it’s lights, camera, action.
He plays the memory straight. V doesn’t have it in him to think of the what-ifs. Like what if he had just been a little faster with his shots. What if he had jumped in front of the bullets as they skidded free-falling down the windows of Konpeki Plaza instead.
What if he had put his hand on his leg. Had kissed him. Just that one last time.
The worst was knowing that the chip would have resurrected him. If Jackie had only kept it, instead of giving it to V. A sacrifice soured because it turned out to be so needless.
Jackie wouldn’t have died.
Sure, he’d be in the same boat as V— the snarling, foul-mouthed engram of Johnny Silverhand eating away at his brain— but he’d be alive. The other details, like how Dex would have zeroed them both, and he wouldn’t have survived, doesn’t matter to V. It wouldn’t be so bad, he reasoned, because it’d be the both of them figuring out how to get the relic out.
Instead, V’s been doing it alone. It’s a cool night, clear sky, stars for miles until they disappear into the tendrils of light put out by far-off Night City. Tomorrow, he’ll be running a job for Dakota on a Wraith camp; pest extermination. But for tonight, it’s just him and Johnny laying back on the hood of his car under the wide open sky of the Badlands.
“Y’know, you could have woken up in Jackie instead.” V says aloud, as if he hasn’t been thinking it in circles for the past ten minutes.
Johnny turns his face to his. He flops his chrome arm over, and he feels so real next to V he expects to hear the clang of chrome on metal; instead, his arm falls silent on the hood, cigarette dangling between his fingers.
“Yeah? Would he have been any better at this?”
“I don’t know.” V shrugs. “Probably. He was better at me than most things.”
Johnny pauses, unnaturally thoughtful.
“Like what?”
Johnny is humoring him. He doesn’t actually care. But V tells him anyway: about Jackie’s lopsided smile, the cleft of his chin that perfectly fit his thumb when he brought him in for a kiss. That he was the kind that’d pull you out to the dance floor, and shimmy against you until you laughed and loosened up, but would back you up in a bar fight if someone spilled their drink on you all the same. That he was a mountain; in stature, in personality, in how much he was loved—
“You ever tell him?” Johnny immediately asks when he says that four letter word. He’s staring straight ahead, eyes shaded behind his aviators.
V hadn’t meant it like that. Because Jackie had been loved, immensely, openly, by Misty and Mama Welles and over half of Heywood with his wisecracking jokes and personable demeanor. There was nothing open about V. He was a journal padlocked, most of the pages torn out even if the cover were to be forced open.
“Never saw it in any of your memories.” Johnny continues, pauses as V stays silent and works his jaw, “Not like I’m taking a fine-toothed comb to ‘em. They just pop up for me sometimes. And it’s not as if I got a whole lot else going on then to watch them or watch you dick around. But…”
V feels like a pair of girls at a sleepover. He’s gonna make Johnny a fucking friendship bracelet and braid his hair under the stars. This kind of shit makes his skin crawl; it’s a vulnerability he can’t physically defend, the way he solves almost all his problems.
Johnny, unfortunately, is another one of those problems he can’t fight his way out of. He still kind of wants to try and punch him for even asking it, but he doesn’t want to dent the hood of his car with his gorilla fists.
V’s throat goes tight, strangling the annoyed huff that escapes him. He can’t say it out loud.
“Nah. Never got around to it.”
The line of Johnny’s mouth is grim. He keeps his eyes, shadowed by his aviators, staring straight ahead. V’s used to his dickheaded behavior of wearing sunglasses at night, but it doesn’t mean he’s got to like it.
“Maybe he knew.”
That doesn’t make V feel any better. Because if Jackie knew, and never said anything— he doesn’t admit it aloud, but he would have wanted to hear him say it, and say it back to him. Jackie was full of more love than V’s ever known, but deep down, he’s sure what they had was just two chooms fucking around and releasing steam.
Anything else was nostalgia, rose-tinted glasses veiled in mourning clothes. Had to be. Hurt too much to imagine it as being any more than that.
“Y’think Alt knew?” Impulsively, V asks, “before she died?”
A part of him regrets saying it before it even fully leaves his lips, casually callous. He can feel Johnny’s hackles rise.
“What does she have anything to do with your gonk?”
The air’s suddenly gone even colder than the usual wind blowing off the rolling dunes. “Oh, alright,” V says defensively, turning to face Johnny even as the other pointedly continues staring up at the sky, “so I have to bare my soul open and you get to keep playing hard ass?”
“Bare your soul.” Johnny repeats indignantly. “So dramatic. Right, like you’re not just trying to change the subject.”
“Fuck off,” V rolls his eyes. “I thought we were just talking! So fuckin’ pissy—”
Johnny sits up suddenly, “I was being nice, asking about your crush on your little gangoon buddy, trying to be friendly.” His chrome hand cuts through the air, finite and sharp, “Don’t bring Alt into this. What we had doesn’t even compare to your couple month rendezvous suck and fuck fest.”
Johnny’s defensive dismissal feels like a betrayal, and the fact that it even feels like a betrayal makes V’s blood thrum hot in his ears with embarrassment that he even cares what Johnny thinks, with self-loathing he redirects into breathtaking fury.
“Yeah? Was it really? You ever tell her you loved her?” V snarls back, “Or did you just tell her she was an eddie a dozen fuck-toy? Grabbed her arm like you were gonna throw her on the ground—”
“What are you implying, you fuck. I never hit her. Only grabbed her like that once. I was fucked up, alright?”
Johnny’s form flickers off of the car; cigarette dangling from his lips, he paces in front of V. His boots don’t kick up dust; no prints appear across the dirt.
“This is real rich coming from you.” Johnny says, “the shit you did. Still do!”
“Yeah, but I never talk about how much I loved and was loved by every gonk I’ve put six feet under. You, though, you do this with everyone!” V sweeps out his arms wide, yelling out into the desert, “Alt, Rouge— all these people you say are your good friends, who ‘parently hang off your every limp-dicked thought— none of them seemed to give half as much of a shit as you seemed to! Especially not anymore!”
Johnny quietly, furiously seethes.
V will not relent. But he never does. Given the chance, he will always cut off his nose to spite his face.
“You’ve got the balls to take on Arasaka, but you’re too chicken shit to tell a woman you love her?”
“Yeah!” Johnny shouts, throws his arms up, both silver and organic. V can feel Johnny’s fury thumping somewhere in the base of his skull, almost loud enough to cover up the current of anguish that runs underneath. “Alright! I was. I was too fucking chicken shit! Or maybe, just up my own fucking ass— And now she’s some god-like digital construct, hey, what a great fuckin’ forever to sentence your output to, ‘cause you knew so little about her own work you unplugged her body to die right on the table—“
By the end, Johnny’s just raging to himself, under no real pretense of actually speaking to V anymore. He turns abruptly to the open terrain, cactuses and rattlesnakes and the skeletons of wind turbines, breathes in deep and just fucking screams in frustration into the night.
It peters off without echo, without reply, only ringing in V’s head.
Johnny whips around, barks, “You happy now?”
“No. I’m not fucking happy. Fuck you, you miserable gonk.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you.”
V suddenly wants a cigarette. It’s such a dirty fucking habit; makes his mouth and clothes and fingers, even though they were made of nonporous chrome and plastic, smell. His only-when-drunk smokes have morphed into a steadily growing thrice a day habit; another straw to add to the heavy pile of all of his grievances against Johnny. His leg bounces with steady irritation against the hood of the car. Johnny paces. This was a stupid job to take on; they can drive away from Rogue’s rejection, but out in the Badlands, they’re only left here with themselves.
If V had the choice, he’d make himself scarce; if he can’t cave someone’s skull in, his only other option in an argument would be to fuck off in a fit. (“We both do that,” says the familiar voice in his head, but V ignores it.)
He’s long since come to accept that he couldn’t escape Johnny; it doesn’t mean he has to like it, especially when there’s nothing else to do in the desert. Can’t even have the radio going or it would drain the Rattler’s battery.
So he’s learning— they’re learning— to just sit in their shit and deal with it.
After the boil over, the anger pulsing between them slowly flattens down to a simmer. Still, he has to get the last word in; with acidic pettiness, V mutters, “I was just trying to fucking commiserate.”
Johnny’s body goes stiff, shoulders rigid in his dirty flak jacket. Carefully, he glances at V over his aviators.
They fall back into mutual silence, surrounded by the occasional background noise of the Badlands: bugs chirping, the yipping wail of faraway coyotes in the dark. V closes his eyes. He should head back into the car soon, and try and fail to get himself comfortable in its cramped interior.
Instead, V pats down his pockets until he finds his pack of smokes. They’re crumpled, a little sweat-stained from being in his back pocket all day. He pulls a cigarette out, lights it.
When he turns after a long inhale, Johnny is back lying on the hood with him, closer this time. V’s blows his exhale through his form; it hangs around like morning smog by the Northside smokestacks, makes his body shiver blue and silver against the smoke.
Listlessly trying to wave it away, Johnny frowns, “Listen, I want to ask you for another favor.”
“Yeah?” V laughs, it’s so absurd. “Now you want a favor, after all that?”
“Yeah, alright?”
V’s exhale comes in a thin stream out from his nose. He ashes his cigarette off the side of his rig. “Negging only works on girls, your groupies, you know.”
Johnny snorts, holding up a chrome finger. “First of all, no, it doesn’t. And speaking of, I want to visit a friend of mine sometime soon. Maybe after this camp clearing of yours is finished. If we make it out alive.”
V dismissively waves him off. “Always do.”
Impatiently, Johnny presses, “so?”
“So? So what? Sew your ass to your mouth,” V shoots back.
Johnny grumbles, but doesn’t reply.
He lets V smoke in disgruntled silence. When V gets down to the filter, flicks it out away from the car and into the inky blue darkness, he finally deigns to speak again: “Alright. Who’s the friend?”
“That was quick—“
“Don’t press your luck.”
“Okay, fine.” This must matter to Johnny, because he acquiesces easier than V expects: “Kerry Eurodyne.”
Laughter bubbles up in V’s chest. “Oh, yeah, Kerry Eurodyne.”
“I know Kerry, alright? We used to play together.”
V underlines his words with his hands. “Used to. Used. To.” He pauses, “also, wasn’t that the fuckin’ twink whose last parting words you shared were, ‘You’re a fuckin’ pussy ’?”
Most of Johnny’s memories are like that, he’s since realized: terrorizing his former fellow band members, either on purpose or with the sheer force of his personality, and most especially Kerry in some capacity. V had mentioned that to him once, and Johnny got so explosively angry about it his migraine lasted an agonizing day and a half
After it had subsided, he skulked back into V’s peripheral, head bowed and giving apologies like he was pulling out his own teeth. V could keep time on the cyclical nature of their fights, set appointments based on the ebb and flow of their squabbles. Sometimes when he watches the people in Johnny’s memories, he wants to fucking shake them: at least they can leave. He doesn’t know why they don’t just leave. Unlike them, they dont have to stick through it, work through it, process all these stupid fucking emotions.
Johnny heaves out a sigh. “I think it was, ‘stop being a pussy’, if we want to get pedantic . But, yeah, that same exact fucking twink.” He rolls his eyes at the word, shaking his head.
“Uh-huh.” It’s an understatement. He won’t point it out, though, and Johnny doesn’t either; V considers it a win he doesn’t have to listen to Johnny try and pin the blame on him, instead taking responsibility of it in silent stride.
“Anyway, you don’t have to hunt him down. I know where he lives, up near North Oak; got himself a buck-a-mansion up there. Done well.”
“Might not be as impressed as Rogue with an abandoned drive-in date, then.”
Ignoring V, Johnny continues on, ”Yeah well, on my night out on the town, his name was all over the screamsheets—“
“Wow, you got in some light reading between finger-blasting some ten-enny joy-toys—?“
“Will you let me fucking finish?”
V holds out his hands, trying not to look too smug getting so easily on Johnny’s nerves.
Johnny rolls his eyes, “Anyway, there were all these articles. Big bold headlines. Clickbait shit.” He pauses a beat, “how he’s depressed, attempted suicide.”
“Oh. Huh. No shit.”
“Yeah. Didn’t manage. Complete amateur hour. Tried to put a bullet through his skull.” His tone’s blasé in the way only people like them were about it; the chronically depressed, the lifelong dips and cycles of mania and numbness. Ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Johnny died at 34; V is 27. They’re both old hat at this, able to find dark hilarity in the familiar, “Bodyguard took his gun like taking candy from a baby.”
“Oh,” V nods with understanding, “rookie shit. Like trying to hang in a house with old beams.”
Johnny points at V, “Or shitty knots.”
“Yeah. Honestly, can’t ever rely on guns either. That’s why you gotta use something manual.” He doesn’t need to say, like a knife. Their meet cute brawl had ended when V had threatened to commit relic-destroying seppuku with a knife to his port. The first week after waking up had been rough for them both.
Now, they’ve settled into some semi-friendly Stockholm syndrome thing, except V has realized they’re both each other’s captors and captives in turn, or some other poetic shit V doesn’t have the vocabulary or energy to assign. They’re going to be stuck with each other, until they’re not.
Johnny scoffs, “No, that’s stupid, someone could take that too.” Though he hadn’t. He had let V go then. He knew that V couldn’t run far. It took V time to come to terms with that. He adds, conversationally, “Considered jumping in front of a panzer, once.”
V hums, “In Mexico, yeah?”
“Nicaragua, actually. Before I defected. They had just told me they were extending my contract. Left the tent, and there it was, rolling right along. And I thought:” Johnny huffs out a laugh, “man, wouldn’t it just be easier now to take a few steps forward?”
He snorts with vague amusement, “That would splatter you.”
“Yup.” V agrees, moves his hand through the air, and makes a sort of wet splat noise with his mouth, just to really paint the picture. What a concept: Johnny Silverhand, ending not with a bang, but a razz of tongue and hours in the mechanic bay getting his organic pieces picked out of the underbelly of an engine. “One ‘n done. Seen a few when takin’ the NCART. Was late meeting with Jackie once ‘cause of it.”
“The fucking NCART is always late.”
“You’re telling me .”
It kills V sometimes, how alike they are. He doesn’t want to admit to it, that he has anything in common with this selfish, bristling, overly defensive asshole. If only because he wants to say he wasn’t always like this; it would be easy to blame this all on Johnny.
Though he knows, he always was. Worse, honestly. It was just Jackie who brought out the best in him in that brief moment, those glorious few months. Like rehabilitating a feral animal, except they let him go too soon.
Now, V gets to wallow back in the mud with the other assholes. It’s sorta where he belongs. It’s in his nature.
Still, “Y’know, considering we’ve both failed on probably more than a few occasions, too, don’t think you can ride your friend’s ass that hard about it.”
“Please don’t talk about riding ass and Kerry,” Johnny mutters quickly, then adds, “does that mean yes? We’ll go visit him after this gig?”
“Maybe.”
“Fine.” Johnny sits up, sighs, “‘nother cigarette?”
“Nope.” V responds with an obnoxious pop to his p, hauling himself up and off the car. He gives his Rattler two fond taps against the roof. “Need to get some sleep before tomorrow’s job. And consider if the hangover is worth giving you the reins again.”
“Right…”
V climbs into the back seat, locks the Rattler down and flicks on the rudimentary defense features, a low battery consuming alarm. It’s nothing special from the outside, practically indistinguishable from so many of the cars left to rot abandoned in the Badlands. He doubts anyone would try to bother the junker even if they did happen to pass by, so many miles away from the road. Still, he leaves on his ratty tee and flannel, and keeps his feet in his boots.
“You’ll consider it?” Johnny’s voice quietly bounces through his head.
With eyes squeezed shut, V makes it a point to frown. “I’m trying to sleep.”
“Will you?— don’t say consider these nuts.”
“Consider these— ah, fuck. Alright.”