Chapter Text
The sun arcs low over the city and turns everything gold.
The shadows at this time of the year are long and slanted, the light making its slow descent beyond the North Oak hills. Somewhere V thought he wouldn’t ever reach. But he’s here now.
V tugs his collar tighter against the October chill as he makes his way around the property’s edge. The air here, high above the city, is laced with orange blossoms. It sparks a half-remembered memory in the back of V’s head, one of those sensory fragments he can’t figure out which mind it’s from. Reminders of another life are coming hard and fast lately.
“Here’s the fucking plan,” Johnny had said, scuffing the lakeshore dirt with his boot. “You kill him.”
And V had thought that sounded like the start of a bad joke— shooting the man while he was already down, giving the media what they want while they already got him by the scruff of the neck with suicide claims. He’s never had a problem with killing the undertow that got caught in the churn of the city because that’s just how things go. But something in him made him hesitate, watching Johnny’s shadow grow in the falling dusk, because, hell, he remembers the guy like his own fucking choom. And that’s just not preem.
“Why?” V asked. “What’s the harm Kerry Eurodyne can do alive?”
Johnny just laughed, and that was the answer in itself.
So when the man in question growls, shoved against the shower wall and skin transferring dampness to V’s clothes, he really should have known the unlocked door foreshadowed a man not afraid of inviting danger in deep.
“Who the fuck are you,” Kerry spits.
V has a hand pressed into his throat, the synthetic metal warm under his palm. He’s trying to reconcile the man he’s seen through Johnny’s eyes with the man in front of him, breathing him in, his million-eddy shampoo steaming the air.
The way things went down is this: Johnny came back and didn’t like how Kerry had become too big for his boots. Didn’t like how he forgot where he came from. That he made a name for himself cozying up to the corpos, sharing the same Tokyo ateliers and Seychelles resorts as the powerdealers that turned Johnny to nothing but dust and bones outside city limits.
First, Rogue. Now a guy he once called a brother, and that dug deeper. Didn’t go with the manifesto they promised themselves half a century back. Sell-out, Johnny cursed, real venom in his voice, but they both knew that it’s simpler than that. He couldn’t hack it that his influence has run out. Even in something that’s always been a sure thing. V had seen straight through him, but it’s getting harder and harder to say no to Johnny these days.
“I’m supposed to believe my dead fucking best friend sent you?” Kerry says. His voice is a low bass under V’s palm.
“Don’t care what you believe,” V smiles.
Kerry scoffs. “Know him so well, what were his last words then, choom?”
V grins. He’s gonna enjoy this one. “Told you to stop being a pussy.”
Kerry’s sneer slips right off his face. His head knocks against the tile, shoulders loosening. “What’s he have on you?”
“Well,” V begins. “Just about everything under the fucking sun.”
The barrel of his gun makes a clinking noise at it slots under Kerry’s jaw. His fingers are half-itching to pull the trigger just to see what would happen to his cybernetics worth more than V’s whole life.
But then he glances up and something is startled out of him from the way Kerry’s looking at him, like a thief who’s stealing from another thief. The scene slows down, flared out the edges, giving him a cold rush of epinephrine like the first time he used a Sandevistan, and he realizes this is the reason why Kerry’s survived all these years while everyone else Johnny knows is dead or dying. Why Johnny’s scared shitless of him.
“Luckily for you and your destiny,” Kerry says, baring his teeth, “You met me at the right time in my life. I happen to be very well connected.”
A tremor of adrenaline sings down V’s spine, but it bottoms out to somewhere closer to anticipation. V can’t help himself leaning in. “Yeah? What’s on the table?”
Kerry smiles, his Kiroshi’s spinning electric blue. Says, just about everything under the fucking sun, before V’s vision shocks out into black.
—
He wakes up on Kerry’s kitchen floor, propped up against the stainless steel of the fridge and a nasty headache gathering at his temples.
The lights are off, and the car’s not in the drive. At least not the one he saw parked half in the grass when he strolled right in. Kerry obviously couldn’t give less of a shit about V robbing his house, or he trusts V enough to leave him there alone. Either option makes V quirk his mouth, his bruised lip splitting under the force.
The blood tastes like a challenge.
—
Two brothers are fighting under the overpass. Bodies flashing in and out of heavy sheets of rain.
Two motorbikes lie fallen over the road, the whole scene slicked by rain and gasoline, while they shove at each other.
He watches them through the car window. He’s seven but old enough to know he doesn’t have anyone like that. He already knows he wouldn’t be able to give someone anything like that.
The stop light flares off his dad’s pistol on the dashboard. The butte finds its match on his mom’s cheek, silent in the passenger seat. Staring at her hands, cast red in fluorescent like they’re already bloodied.
The empty shadow next to him grows as the car gains speed into the gathering night. It turns into the shape of everything he cannot have.
—
It’s late and V hefts the weight of Archangel in his hand. His ears are still ringing from the concert, and he wonders if Kerry had called at the time of the night most others are either sound asleep or fucking for the Johnny show or the pleasure of rubbing shoulders with an edgerunner who forty-eight hours ago had his barrel up close and comfortable against Kerry’s chrome. Time moves fast when Kerry is involved.
The pounding at his temples grows with every shot, but he’s too curious to head home just yet. Kerry’s every move, every grin and sloppy pat on the cheek and profane barb is massively exaggerated. V knows more about faking than most, but it’s so blatant it's amazing that nobody else seems to notice.
Maybe that’s the point. V’s not made a habit of turning a gig into anything more, but he feels the weight of Kerry’s eyes like a hand on the back of his neck. It burns hot, and V wonders if that’s the look he used to give Johnny. He runs a finger around the rim of his tequila, catching the salt.
He’s mentally subduing Johnny, his blind fury at V flagrantly disobeying only slightly sated when he got his rocks off on stage, when Bes is dragged off her barstool by some friends. V has a sudden and powerful desire for her to stay there.
A few feet away, Kerry sets down his pool cue while balls are still skittering across the green. It's not as if he's the first client of V’s to want something extra. Normally he wouldn't give it this much thought. It’s messy for no good reason, outside of the boundaries of the role he plays.
But when Kerry slides into the seat next to him and their eyes catch, V sees nothing but himself reflected back. Not shame or the barest hint of remorse, not even the fading strains of adrenaline he expected. Not a single thought of his jilted lover, Johnny, in the back of his head.
There’s an edge to it. A look that reminds him of when he drove out of the city for the first time. Badlands in the last weeks of summer is like nothing else. A heat so dry it turns every breath burning on its way down like a shot with no chaser. In the city, the night sky is never actually dark. It just goes from white bright to grey static, the noise and light and dirt having no way to go except back down.
Out there, the sky was black. The desert stars reminded him of those starship battles in old scifi vids: millions of glowing tracers arcing through space. V hadn’t ever known a dark like that before. Jackie got wasted on a bottle of mescal klepted from his dad, while V went off on his own. Smoked a joint. Stared at the wide and bottomless sky.
It was the kind of dark that had everything in it. Life and breath and heat and motion, and the undercurrent of violence deep beneath it all.
He sets his glass down. Sees the same kind of dark in front of him.
"How long have you known?" V asks.
“No idea what the fuck you're talking about, choom,” Kerry says, evenly.
Underneath the bar, V feels muscles shift against his thigh. He runs his tongue over his canines.
—
He’s seven but he gets older.
He gets older and learns to keep his mouth just shut enough to keep out of trouble and give the right sort of smile to get something out of it, but not so lost in the game he forgets not to be him. Because it’s not enough to be a weapon in Night City. He makes himself into a gas slick instead, sliding into the idea of a person that people want to see. Quiet, real easy-like. Someone you trust.
It gets him into a good gig with the Valentinos and on his eighteenth birthday he gets given the smuggling circuits that stretch from behind the Oregon border down south to San Jose.
He's come up against the hired mercs in the south near LA who shoot on sight. Once drove the eastern line for eight days until he found an opening before they closed behind barbed wire and watchtowers, men with AK-47s who watch with the blank faces of chromed-up corpo soldiers and never miss a shot. On his twenty-first birthday, he buys his a burial plot for his mom with the thirty thousand eddies he’d saved up and a shard of heavy freight data worth four times as much— no one takes money anymore.
He can’t stand the city after that.
He keeps driving, and even if it’s not forward movement, it’s motion and that’s enough. Spends his twenty-second birthday fighting off scavs while his Thornton refueled outside the broken remains of Sacramento; his twenty-third fighting off the cold in an abandoned armory he broke into in Modesto, missiles and rotten boxes of ammunition stretching down halls that went for miles; the years passing with the slow ecstasy of napalm and sarin gas in underground bunkers dusty with disuse.
He learns how to build grenades from kitchen supplies, calcium nitrate and platinum triggers laid out on his hood, never good in chemistry at school while he was learning the slow and hard way in the science of demolition. Burned his arm out by Fayetteville, and was feverish for months on the street taking antibiotics more stims than sulfonamides. Nearly lost a finger in a dead town in the Florida panhandle and watched two chooms die just outside Atlanta city limits, whose faces he can barely remember.
V never made it to Texas. But he remembers it as vivid as Heywood now.
The wheel of a truck under his palms. Agroland stretching in quadrants of vivid brown and black, broken by the sprawling megacities of Dallas and San Antonio and Houston. Landscape a silent sea of maize under a vast, creeping twilight, and the headlights of auto-threshers moving through the desolation. He remembers blood-rust fields dotted with cattle, half-year calves running on the outskirts of the herds. He remembers this is what he saw between jobs, lives being lived that had nothing to do with the alien sound of the sea and sleeping behind new barbed wire and old prayers. He remembers the bruises.
You gotta have a home or you’ll die. Everybody knows that.
Canada's safe, a nearly impenetrable wall that's held for five years. South America's falling, or so he's heard— the border guards are restless with the trigger. Most of NUSA’s a place of last resort, pockets of civility here and there through the continent, dying slow or dying fast. Even the best promises run thin, and the day he left Atlanta he saw four hundred streetscum die screaming, mowed down by federal dropships.
When he’s busted on his ass in a carpark garage with Jackie’s bloody grin and a NCPD-issued beating as his homewarming gift, he thanks whatever god that’s listening that he was born in Night City, under neon so bright he can’t see the stars.
—
He returns with a reputation and scars with stories, and in Night City that’s enough to earn anyone attention.
It’s the reason behind the interest of the powerful in keeping him close. But it doesn’t explain why he’s in Kerry’s orbit, who knows too much to think his sort of danger isn’t the kind you run far from.
After Red Dirt, he knows it’s in his best interests not to see Kerry again. He's certain Johnny will find a way to castrate him if he’s caught with his hand down Kerry’s pants in some shitty Watson bathroom.
With Johnny being in his head, even thinking that thought implicates him. It requires more willpower than he expects during the whole blowing up a van deal, but he’s committed to the Johnny-V friendship show being in his best interests and sees little reason to drastically change direction.
But the unexpected undercurrent of envy he feels towards Johnny makes him pause. Johnny’s already had the guy, fifty years back, and now the claim is irreversible. Nobody talks about it, but he knows from the fragmented, blurred snaps of memory just how far it went.
But there are things that Johnny doesn’t know. Like the man Kerry’s become since Johnny died. Everyone calls him Kerry but V’s picked up that only the people who he lets hurt him call him Ker. He has eyes like the Pacific that hold a look like he’s in the constant know of some private joke at everyone’s expense. He’s grown into a taste for the sort of cocktails that makes Johnny gag in the corner of the nameless penthouse bars, but still smokes Lucky Strike’s. Same kind as Johnny did, mentioned with an unreadable glance sat on back alley steps when Johnny goes wherever he goes when he’s not there.
Things like Kerry tried sobriety once, but it lasted exactly 29 days before he realized he was better at being himself on drugs. That V thinks Kerry’s shoulders - when he rolls them - have seen a lot of things, but his gait has an ease to it. A confidence. Not a lot of people have that. Kerry’s slender in the way V knows his hand would slide without trouble around his waist, but if you keep looking there’s something very off and wild about him. A person who looks harmless isn’t always harmless.
He likes to think of himself as a good judge of character. Kerry isn’t a good person, but he doesn’t try to hide it and that counts for everything.
V holds his face up as Viktor places the last butterfly stitch on a bloody gash in his cheek. His sides are fine - just bruised from here to hell - but some asshole had a signet ring on when he punched V. His jaw’s sore and he’s fuming from the indecency.
“Should be right as rain,” Viktor says, stepping away. He turns to Kerry. “Try and stay out of fights, okay, boys?”
“Yes, sir,” Kerry answers for him, and V looks down at his lap, trying and failing to hide the flex of his fingers against his thigh.
V puts his weight on Kerry when he gets up, palm on his shoulder, and feels the metal of his jacket bite into skin. He’s certain he’ll find an imprint there if he remembers to look later on.
Jackie used to say, you ain’t like one of us, V. God wasted putting all those brains in a Heywood boy.
It wasn’t a complement back then, and it isn’t one now. Sometimes V forgets what life was like before he ran solo. Forgets that he’s just somebody caught in an impossible circumstance, and learned how to wield his weapons through trial and error instead of native ease.
V got shot for the first time when he was fifteen. Quickly learned that it isn't like in the vids where all it takes to get a bullet out of the body is a bottle of whiskey and a rusted knife, the spirits more for moral support than anything else. V can't just man up and ignore the pain, not when it hurt like fucking hell. He staggered through the damp heat of the night, blood seeping through his clothes and staining the white of his t-shirt. Jackie taught him how to do his own stitches, how to hide the pain from the people that would use it against you.
The city doesn’t teach you to be selfish. It teaches you the laws of the animal world.
It teaches him that years later he’ll be sitting in a car half-buried in the crumbling basement of a megabuilding while he hears the chatter of a TraumaTeam inbound on his klepted comms and he’ll hear the gunfire and the wet sound of meat being torn off bone and gristle and then he’ll hear nothing at all except his own heartbeat and static.
The job teaches him about the quiet nights. Three girls standing around a BD fetish scroller bleeding out from a knife in the carotid, not going to say a thing because they’re undocumented and wherever they’ve come from is worse than this. Where the lights in the high rises fall like shards in the subterranean dark. The nights he drives the whole way home in silence. Nothing but the sound of the road under tires under that grows bigger and bigger until it consumes everything. Until that sound is the city itself, breathing life and death into every second.
V ain’t like the rest of them, but he can play at being normal better than anybody else, and that’s the truth of the matter.
That night, he pauses at the mirror while the shower steams up the room. He looks over his body, cataloguing all the scars the city’s given him this past year. The one on his thigh from where a cyberpsycho got him with her machete, nearly slicing his femoral. A singe high on his temple from a stray MaxTec bullet, caught as he was evaccing a high-ranking corpo target. The smattering on his left ribs from a dirty bomb outside a drug den down in Pacifica. The neat lines soldered onto his spine, Sandivestan behind them. An echo of a bullet between his eyes.
A thousand cuts, pale on tan, not old enough to have blended in with his skin, but not new enough to have gotten them under Johnny’s watch. Except his most recent— a small white line bisecting his eyebrow earned six weeks ago by Kerry’s pistol. Everyone leaving their mark, until there’ll be no more of him left.
He steps into the shower and watches the water run red, seeing Kerry’s soft, dark animal eyes in the blood pooling around his feet.
—
His mom once told him the saddest sound on earth is the midnight wind through palms. She had been staring at the smooth, black sea with her feet sunk into the sand.
Sometime after V’s fifth drink the air inside the house becomes suffocating. Made his way outside to find a corner away from the light billowing out from the windows on Kerry’s balcony, biting down Lagavulin and chasing it with sucks of lime. The poor bastard’s whiskey sour. Staring at the palms lining the fall of North Oak into the city and wishing he could hear them.
He’s out there alone for maybe twenty minutes before Kerry slides opens the door. He smiles one of those half-ones when V turns his head, like the first time V had told him he’d get him what he wanted. A slow, knowing curve of his cheeks that he thinks somebody could know better under their palm than by sight.
“Hey, V,” says Kerry. He stops a few feet from where V’s sat on the ledge. He’s wearing black, making his hair and eyes look nearly luminescent against the dark. A gust of wind picks up, lifting his Kerry’s hair, gel undone by sweat and warm bodies.
“Why aren’t you in there?” V asks, gesturing with his glass.
Kerry shrugs. “Honestly, I wouldn’t feel a thing if the whole goddamn house burns down tonight.”
V raises his glass. “Too drunk or not drunk enough to stand your own party?”
“You know better than most that there’s nothing in my life not improved by being fucked out of my mind,” Kerry says, taking a step forward. He runs a hand through his hair.
They’re quiet for a moment. It’s the kind you feel more than hear, the sounds of the party muffled by the glass like being underwater. Kerry is flushed and bright-eyed and he’s looking askew at V’s face, a not-smile playing at the edges of his mouth because it was a joke, sure, but it also really fucking wasn’t, and V is both too drunk and not drunk enough for this.
They’ve been hanging out a lot lately. It shouldn’t be a big deal. Johnny seems to think it is.
“You good?” Kerry asks, gaze turning back to the city lights. “Why’re you hiding out here?”
“Got too loud,” says V.
“Mm.”
“Don’t know why you invited me,” V says, trying to sound casual but tone dropping towards petulant. He’d rather go a few rounds with an Animal than be cornered again against a wall by the ripperdoc on call for half the powerbrokers in Central, the man strung out on starlight and promises that he’d give V performance enhancers for his dick, but he’s got to get real intimate with what I’m working with.
“Always so laced up,” Kerry says. “I’m trying to help. You spend all day chopping corpocunts up, you gotta unwind or one day you’ll pop one off in your own skull.”
V laughs into his drink. He doesn’t need to meet new people. But that’s not the problem here.
Kerry grins, swaying forward. A hand comes to rest on the railing beside V. “Yeah, okay, should’ve known. What’re you drinking?”
Wordlessly, V shows him the contents of his glass. Kerry makes a face. “Is that whiskey or beer?”
“Scotch.”
“Straight?” Kerry asks. “Didn’t think Heywood boys had time to be connoisseurs.”
V gestures at one of the lime wedges balanced precariously on the railing.
“Fuck me. This is depressing, V.”
“Just ‘cause you like matcha-hai’s and shit doesn’t mean the rest of us do.”
“Damn right I love matcha-hai’s,” says Kerry, laughing. “And ginpoms,” he adds. “And sake bombs, and tequila fuckin’ sunrises. Drinking ain’t gotta be torture.”
“Scotch isn’t torture.”
“Says the sad fuck drinking it alone.”
“With lime,” says V, corner of his mouth lifting. He doesn’t care how much it reveals, not when he has Kerry so close. His thigh knocks against Kerry’s arm, lets it rest there. “Lime makes it preem.”
At that, Kerry’s attention snaps from the party back to V. He tilts his chin up and and smiles, a slow thing. “Show me, then,” he says.
So that’s how it’s gonna be.
Slowly, V takes a sip of scotch. It’s nothing good, drinking shitty, lukewarm alcohol from a glass he rinsed out in the sink, but it is good the way Kerry’s looking at him, and it’s good that they’re alone in this dark, quiet moment while the rest of the party happens without them. And it’s really good when Kerry picks up one of the lime wedges and raises it to V’s lips, holding it steady while V bites into it and sucks.
V licks the juice from his lips with the tip of his tongue and stretches out into the space between them. Kerry’s eyes narrow as V slides his hand around his waist, chasing his warmth. He’s emboldened by the way Kerry’s eyes are fixed on his mouth. By the way Kerry’s skin looks in the low light. The way he smells this close up, ridiculously expensive like something forbidden to a man of V’s status. V likes it so much that he widens his legs from where he’s perched, shifts forward a little so the vee of his thighs presses into Kerry’s stomach. Wants to see how far he can take it tonight in front of all these people, especially the media who’ve been giving hungry glances out of the dark windows at who Kerry’s got cornered in the late hour.
Night City has its animals. Has its predators, has its prey. V’s always thought of himself as the former, even at his worst, but there’s a half-feral glint in Kerry’s eyes.
And V may still be playing a role, but sooner or later all games become serious. Especially the ones with no way out but through. So he stares back, daring.
But then something shifts on Kerry’s face, a low-down dark thing, and the warm hand on V’s thigh drops down. Kerry opens his mouth like he’s about to apologize, but makes a small noise like he’s been kicked in the stomach instead and backs off. V can’t tell if the burn on his cheeks is the drink or the feeling of being denied something he already thought was his as he watches the door shut behind him.
The wind picks up and the palms grow loud until they drown out everything else. Then they grow soft again, and everything’s silent once more.
—
It turns out that it’s hard to ignore Kerry Eurodyne when you have a reason to.
His face is on every other holo downtown, half of it real, the other half probably copyright infringement that no amount of money can fight. Off the back of the suicide rumors, the screamsheets have decided to run 24/7 updates on Kerry, complete with grainy drone photos of Kerry and a shadowed body on the balcony under the headline exclusive: 2077’s first glimpse of night city’s most eligible bachelor to add insult to injury.
“Don’t know why people eat this shit up, the grit, the temper, the leather, the sex,” Johnny says, shuddering into view, slouched on the izakaya stool next to V. V’s trying to ignore Kerry’s face on the holos above him and failing. “All fake.”
“What they don’t know,” Johnny preaches, flicking his cigarette butt into V’s bowl, “is that Kerry always thought he was destined for two things. Attention and success.” Johnny’s boots hit the counter, crossed at the ankle. “He had the talent, but the other two are out of any bastard’s control. Didn’t matter to him where he got them from. Killed his mom to find out he used music the same way addicts do drugs and scavs kill. A compulsion that excuses their own narcissism.”
“And you were a fucking saint,” V says, lighting up a smoke.
When Kerry’s number lights up his screen later that night, Johnny turns his gaze to the night rushing outside the car windows, his mouth tight. V glances at him, and then grips the wheel, driving deeper into the churning night.
It’s only half his fault. Kerry is a persuasive bastard when he wants to be, leaning against the stage at Dark Matter like some joytoy wearing those leather trousers and a surprisingly sincere grin. V stands at the top of the stairs, taking a moment to adjust to this iteration of Kerry, smug and playful and under the attention of everyone in the room.
After the single release, Kerry for the most part ignores V. Instead, he holds court with the journos as they listen, rapt, clueless to the fact that the man held Us Cracks at gunpoint less than a month ago. While talking, he leans back in the booth and slides his palm over V’s thigh under the table. It should be sleazy, the way Kerry doesn't even look at him as he does it, but it doesn't matter. V’s not exactly here for the conversation. He spreads his legs just to let him get closer. It feels a lot like giving into the urge to place a hand on a lit stove.
But there's something about the look on Kerry’s face on the terrace, the wind that high up whipping V’s hair. The absolute surety painted on his perfect, smiling features that they’re gonna end up pressed up against another wall again somewhere soon. He's right, of course. He’ll learn that Kerry always is, in his own way. It irritates him. So does Johnny’s similar smug self-confidence.
He’s thrumming with adrenaline afterward as they leave the club. His body is still on high alert, hyperaware, and everything seems magnified: the light of the scrolling holos, the smell of his own sweat, the sound of Kerry’s footfall behind him.
Us Cracks have already gone. If V had any sense, he should follow their example as quickly as possible and get the hell out of whatever he’s found himself in.
Kerry really ought to know this better than anyone, his goddamn face on the holos scrolling above them even here in Little China, but that doesn’t stop him from meandering down the middle of the road with his shades in his hand, grinning at the crowd with a lazy wave. V means to take the next corner, flag down a cab and be done with this, eddies or not, and yet, before he quite realizes what’s happening, Kerry’s managed to steer him straight, toward Downtown.
After the briefest moment of consideration, V allows himself to be led.
The air presses down in spite of the late hour. The humidity itches under V’s skin, makes him want to strip out of his jacket. He runs a palm under his collar and slants a glance at Kerry, who’s not said a word since they left Riot. His body language is far more relaxed than it was an hour ago, loose and fluid, but V is reminded of the gun in his waistband, his implants flashing under the neon, brutality hidden under aesthetics.
Even knowing his special brand of madness from Johnny’s head, V can’t quite believe how reckless Kerry is with his reputation. Perhaps he’s gone certified pyscho in the intervening years. Perhaps all the bluster is so people don’t look too hard at the look in his eyes, the one that V saw straight through quick enough. Perhaps it’s the reason why he’s got to where he is.
Never stole a thing in my life, Kerry promised him, with Archangel drawn and a deadly grin, ‘cause I make them wanna give it to me.
“Wanna tell me where we’re going?” V asks.
Kerry opens his arms, turns around in the middle of the damn road. “V, we’re having a drink,” he says, with exaggerated nonchalance, and the self-satisfied twist of Kerry’s lip is making his blood run hot. The image of him, here, now, insane, dangerous, beautiful, the gun in his waistband on full display, looking like a million eddies. His mom must be rolling in her grave. Kerry fucking Eurodyne.
It’s just a drink, V knows, a night he’ll remember until Johnny takes that too, and tomorrow Kerry’ll have forgotten all about him, a merc with nothing but a few tricks and blood money to his name. It doesn’t mean anything in the end– not to Kerry, not to him, and not to Night City.
Kerry looks back over his shoulder and V feels his heartbeat in his ears. “I love it when the night’s just starting.”
They end up in a grungy little club tucked away in Japantown. It’s crammed with bottom rung corpos with cheap suits and restless eyes and money to burn but nowhere to go.
The leather of his jacket sticks to the bar counter. Past his elbows a doll slowly spins on a pole, and she looks down at V with indifference. When he glances over, Kerry’s profile is lit in cherry-red and he’s already slouched in the seat like he owns the place. V considers that he might.
“Think Sangwoo’s the one with formaldehyde still in,” Kerry says speculatively, looking at the menu in his hand. “Probably does an excellent job on the liver.”
“Speaking of which, what number’s that?” V says, nodding down at Kerry’s side where he’s seen incision lines curve over his ribs.
“Let’s not ruin the mystery tonight, sweetheart,” Kerry laughs. He raises two fingers at the bartender for shots. “I was already on my second by your age.”
V leans on his folded arms. “There’s worse vices.”
Kerry smiles at the doll as she leans down to run a hand up his collar. “Didn’t think you’d know.”
They order a third round, and then a fourth, biting back shitty spirits that taste like military iodine. Spending time with Kerry when there’s no real stakes at risk is easy in a way that V wouldn’t have expected. Almost relaxing. He’s almost forget that he has his back to the door, despite the sweat pooling at the base of his spine and the quickening of his heartbeat.
Two bottles later and the doll’s got Kerry’s collar open to his chest, implants on display, Kerry’s words slowing down in the thick air. All his restless energy and sharp edges given weight by alcohol and dim lighting.
Kerry’s betrayed only by his nervous hands: tapping an arrhythmic beat on the table, tapping his glass, worrying his straw. They’re good hands, elegant, capable, musician’s hands. More confident now, V lets himself look, eyes traveling up to settle on the scar on his face, just above the lip, a raised white mark. He’s never asked about it, though a half-baked thought spirals into his head, to find the shape of it under his tongue, tasting tequila and nicotine and sweat–
V wets his mouth, quickly, almost a habit. He doesn’t mean anything by it, but he also doesn’t miss the way Kerry falters mid-sentence, or the way he drops his gaze down to V’s mouth before glancing away, playing at indifference.
The humiliation of last week suddenly stings V right under his skin, right where it counts. But almost as quickly as it comes, a fire chases it, something that makes him almost manic, like when he held a gun to someone’s forehead for the first time. Something in his gut plummets and shifts. Heat rushes his spine.
He makes a decision on instinct and turns in his seat. Braces an arm over the back of Kerry’s and gives him nothing more than a slow slide of a smile, like a stocking ripping its seam, inviting Kerry to have a good long look. He knows very well what he looks like, the sort of thoughts that have got Kerry to shift before he turns to call down the bartender to ask for 2 more and the check.
“What were the 20s like?” V asks, knee knocking into his thigh.
“Christ, didn’t know you had such a hard-on for history,” Kerry says.
Two glasses of tequila sodas slosh over Kerry’s hand as he hands his over. His mouth fastens over the inside of his wrist to suck off the spill. V can’t look away from the delicate spread of his bones there.
“It was real quiet,” Kerry gives after a moment. “Never heard the city so silent after the stunt Johnny pulled. Like it was shocked into submission. The ash turned the sky red for four fucking years and had to start carrying a gun just to pick up beer at Mark 24 because gonks were getting killed for a lot less.”
“What did you do?” V knows Kerry understands the hidden after.
“Tried to keep Samurai together. Crashed and burned, fucked off to the Philippines. Hated it. Came back. The media’s got the rest.”
“Yeah, you know I wasn’t alive to read the screamsheets back then?”
“Shit, I keep forgetting you’re just a kid. Fighting, fucking, drinking, touring, the usual,” he says. Kerry tips his drink back and looks over. “Don’t meet a lot of people these days who weren’t there for all of that.”
Impatience flares at the back of V’s neck, regardless of the appraising look on Kerry’s face.
“Don’t need Johnny to hear the whispers about how your hiatus’s gone a little bit too long,” V says. It’s a petty blow, but he’s slipping past the point of fucked up he’d usually stop at, and being constantly reminded of men who’ve lived several lifetimes more than him is starting to taste real bitter.
“I’ll give ‘em a new album after I’m done with this bottle,” Kerry says, quickly, blasé, but his eyes flash oddly in the dim light. He starts to turn back to the bar, and only then through his pulling back does V notice how close they’ve gotten, shoulders bumping, like they’re in a back room in the Afterlife, two players planning something bigger than the sum of them.
“You know what? Fuck ‘em.” V says, abruptly, reaching to palm Kerry’s thigh before he can stop himself.
Kerry pauses. Then he nods, bites back the rest of his drink, his throat bobbing. His Kiroshi blues have their own gravity in the late hour.
“Let’s burn the city and every last motherfucker in it,” Kerry says and V can’t help but grin.
The world is spinning out of focus by the time they stumble out of the bar and this time V doesn’t question where he’s going this time, the recycled air in the back of the cab cold on his skin, but doing nothing to cool the heat of Kerry next to him. He rolls down the side window as they speed past the waterfront and cups the warm night air, letting it stream between his fingers, easy.
The lights of the city play strange shapes over Kerry’s face as the elevator makes its way up the MSM Records Building.
“Is this a client services thing, or a choom to choom deal?” V asks, steadying himself with a hip cocked on the elevator wall.
The scene would almost be civilized if it weren’t for the sight of Kerry unholstering his Overture, finger thumbing off the safety as lounge music plays softly from the speakers.
“Why? Am I not paying you enough?” Kerry asks, looking up from the gun with surprisingly sincere eyes.
“What—,” V begins, pushing off the wall. “No, that’s not it.”
“Guess I thought money made a situation where you wouldn’t say no,” Kerry shrugs, before the elevator doors open with a ding. "I'll just ask next time."
Everyone turns to look at them. “Hey,” Kerry shouts across the lounge bar, and V watches the gun come up and take a shot before whoever the hell Kerry is talking to has a chance to respond.
Instantly, there's scrambling from the tables, quickly bitten back shouts to keep from drawing attention. V takes a step back and flips open the lift panel with the manual lock, flicking it before working at the window panels.
Kerry doesn't rush his stride— there's only one voice screaming, one person on the floor, clutching helplessly at his knee, surrounded by spilled saké and a handful of nuts. Kerry casually kicks a chair out of his way, nudging the table aside with one hip before lowering one boot onto the man's chest, pressing him onto the floor.
"You know," Kerry says, thumbing the safety as he shifts his foot, boot pressing on an unprotected throat, "I hate being manipulated. Especially by a guy I thought was a choom.”
The guy —Kovachek, V vaguely remembers seeing him holding court at the Arasaka hotel lounge bar, dressed in the gonk uniforms all the MSM account execs had adopted— wheezes, and V watches Kerry put more pressure. Even from the other side of the room, V can see the panic, one hand reaching up to clutch helplessly at Kerry’s ankle. He says something that V can't quite hear, but Kerry cocks his head, nodding agreeably. Then he shifts his weight abruptly, and V can almost hear the crunch of the man's trachea beneath the heel of Kerry’s boot.
Blood bubbles up around the man's mouth, eyes huge and desperate as he struggles for air.
“Glad you realize that. But this lesson wasn’t for you." Kerry pauses, leaning back on one hip. Both the man's hands clutch at his ruined throat, and V can almost hear him thinking of the Trauma Team chip in his head, even now, he could be fixed. Hell, with the corpo package he probably has, he could die and still come back better than new.
Kerry just watches, head cocked, kicking one reaching hand aside as the man rolls over on his side, struggling for each breath with sounds like tearing a wet paper bag. After a few more seconds, Kerry turns away, stepping over one reaching hand. "Leave him there," Kerry says to the assembled crowd, who maybe didn't quite get that Kerry didn't earn his reputation by being inconspicuous. Shoving his gun down his back, Kerry smiles at them. "Move."
They scatter, some glancing toward the main door and V, the others shifting warily toward the balcony— to jump off, V supposes maliciously, thinking that hitting the bay from this height will be like hitting solid concrete— while Kerry wanders through to the bar, filling his arms with whatever's at hand. “Moonchie,” V calls out, and Kerry laughs but tosses one his way. Glancing back, V lets himself enjoy the terrified silence, then at Kerry’s nudge, follows him back into the elevator.
"Feel better?" V asks, ripping the wrapper open with his teeth.
Kerry grins. "Yeah."
Kerry whines about finding real food, so they stop at a nearby noodle cart, trying not to knock into anyone as they weave down the narrow strip of pavement.
He makes a decent attempt to order in Tagalog, but his accent is atrocious, ‘cos I’m fucking delta’d, man. The hawker gives them a dirty look that V matches with a shameless grin, and it’s all right because Kerry’s laughing too, leaning into him, with his hand cuffed tightly in V’s collar as though to keep him close.
Tomorrow, V won’t remember the food at all, but he’ll remember the color of Kerry’s mouth, flushed red with chili, and how the burn of his tongue felt on V’s lips. He won’t know how he got back to his building but he’ll remember the way he wanted Kerry in his bed instead of up against the wall, hand shoved in his pants, how his stubble looked under the lights, the shiver of hot skin in the arctic chill of the aircon. He’ll remember looking at Kerry’s body, lean and pliant and gorgeous, tracing the outline of the gun at the small of his back, and his hands that are good and capable as he fumbled in his wallet to throw a hundred eddies at the driver. He’ll remember someone saying, you’re a bad idea- shouldn’t be doing this-, but he won’t remember who.
What he doesn't count on is the phantom sensation of somebody’s delayed guilt or the more familiar sting of hurt when V catches Kerry glancing over V’s shoulder where he knows Johnny’s chain-smoking, like he can see him too. And V’s been damping down the resentment at others for navigating out of their own loneliness for so long, made a life out it, but the reality of it smacking across his face like an electric shock to his system. The idea of more than one person in the universe being able to affect Kerry is almost enough to—
But it doesn’t matter. Because he’ll wake up alone in the morning, ferociously hungover with another few marks on his public record, and he won’t hear from Kerry again until the season change.
—
It rains more in thirty one days then in V’s whole life, enough to wash out the city like cleaning out a wound.
He watches the Afterlife empty from his barstool, drying his soaked jacket under the rattling heaters. The usual fixers stay clear of him, because he’s five deep on vodka sodas, clearly nursing a bad shoulder and an even worse temper. The thunder shakes the foundations.
V had long ago rationalized his nature, but it still hurt every time he was reminded of it, a shallow, biting ache like a broken rib. Attachment to him isn’t like it others. He knows enough about himself to know even that. For him, it’s like the phantom pain of jerking awake after falling from a great height in a braindance: your brain knew that it should hurt, and so the impact still resonated along your nerves, even when it failed to occur. So V decides to keep drinking.
It’s not until the fatigue has caught up to him that a glitch in his chip splits his vision into white. It’s on the backend of a migraine that’s been building since he left Dark Matter, a low level throb right at the base of his skull, but now it's so bad he can barely move, head hung over the toilet, retching the past month back. Viktor bypasses his flat’s security lock with barely a pause just so V knows exactly how private and secure his apartment is.
He leans cross-armed on the bathroom door and says, “Ah, shit, kid.” He hands him a small blue pill.
V rests his head on the cool porcelain. Takes a look at the pill, then at Viktor’s boots. “These aren't out of the labs yet. Not supposed to be on the streets until next year."
Vik just grunts and hands him a bottle of water, and at some point V should just stop being capable of surprise. He slumps back onto his haunches, swallows the pill, and when he opens his eyes again his headache has receded somewhere deep inside his skull. Vik is crouched in front of him, mouth a hard line. His hand hovers over V’s shoulder uncertainly. “You gotta take it easy.”
V laughs. “Easy’s so far down the list it’s not even a possibility.”
He moves to sit up, but fresh pain spikes through his head. He grits his teeth. “You can tell the doctor that his magic pill doesn't work."
"It’s uncharted territory, kid. We’ve left terra cognota, we’re in motherfucking space,” Vik says. “Anything else, princess?” There's a gruff humor laced through his voice that V’s memorized.
“Still got a fear of heights, have anything for that?”
Vik holds out a hand and lifts up V to his feet with a grunt. “Not quite. That’s psychosomatic. There's a different pill for that one.”
V pushes past the bead curtains and braces himself on the bed. His eyes slip close, everything turning softer and muted with the sound of traffic far below him and Vik’s mutterings around his flat.
“If there’s anyone destined to die in the stars, it’s you, Vincent,” he hears as he falls into a deep, medicated sleep.
—
He wakes up and spends his last paycheck on a Caliburn just so he can lie in the backseat and watch the rain track across the windows.
Something about the grey sky reminds him of T-Bug, somewhere out there, past the rain heavy night, rotting in a nameless room in a nameless megablock. Maybe she’ll be found when they come to evict. Maybe she’ll never be found. It doesn’t matter. The city always wins.
Entropy is a game he’s long learned to stop playing. But the rain reminds him of things relentless, things without reason.
Like the nightmares, trailing him deep for six months now.
At first they’re abbreviated, broken sensations that make sleep hard without a muscle relaxant or a mild soporific. But then they grew roots and shake him awake every hour or so. He finds himself in wrong places, not sleepwalking exactly, but not fully conscious either. The harbor wall, the roof of his megablock, twice the lobby of his childhood building. At least three times curled up in his apartment’s armory. He hides in the dark and gasps as if wounded. His temperature shoots up and he sweats through his clothes, and he supposes that’s how much stress his body is under when he dreams. Johnny stands there and tells him he suffers through the nightmares like a saint suffers through martyrdom: teeth gritted and thankful for being given the chance to touch something unfathomable without having yet died.
“What happened to you?” Judy asks, guarded, as V shows up at her door. “Did Arasaka get to you overnight?”
“Prone to hurting myself,” is the excuse, and she invites him in.
V sits at her counter in silence, watching as Judy pads around the kitchen, turning the rice cooker on. Frying something in a pan. The fridge light catching her face in harsh white light. The rain is a steady pitch outside.
She leans across the kitchen counter and slides a bowl over. When V looks up, her face is the perfect picture of concern hiding under indifference. V suddenly feels hungrier than he has in days. The bruises around his sides have started to purple and blacken. He's a fast healer — he'll be okay.
But he can feel Judy’s guilt, transmitting across the laminate and hydrogen peroxide air and the places where Evelyn’s blood was scrubbed clean, and V wonders why she should even have to hide at all. They’re his bruises to dig at. They’re his wounds to salt in. No one else but him gets to hurt him like he does. Whatever the world does to him is nothing, comparatively.
Judy sighs and pushes off the counter. “It’s been a while,” she says, but V knows that it’s just another way of saying, i’m sorry i can’t help you.
Like the way Judy’s head snapped up months back, brown eyes wide as she met him outside her stairs, face open with worry.
Like the way V turned back, opening the bathroom door, into the thickening smell— sweet and sickly, so familiar that V already backed away before his mind caught up to what he saw. Palm-shaped, rusting brown stains circling the drain.
"Oh Jesus,” Judy whispered, coming up beside him. V grabbed a handful of her shirt, jerked her back before she could get a foot in the door. "What—“
"Don't go in there," he said. The smell was so strong that V wondered how he could have missed it before: musty-thick, maybe a few days or less. Nausea rolled slowly in his stomach, but he ignored it by habit. He holstered his gun, kept Judy at his back.
"I've seen dead bodies," Judy said, but she was pale, lips thin, staring at the blood stains around the doorframe with an expression that V couldn’t work out.
"Not like this." V said.
And she couldn’t have known then that V was while staring at Evelyn’s wrists, he was thinking that the best thing about Jackie’s death was that V actually felt something.
But under her kitchen fluorescents, now, it’s like she can feel the dull, muted pain that bleeds out of him like he can. Something centered somewhere around vague memories of fighting off Arasaka monsters in the dark with flares and promises made under candlelight, the only soft thing in the world back then. It's there, relentless, though he tries to suffocate it with hangovers and come-downs and blood loss.
He sat up nights before the ofrenda and considered all the different ways to deal with it. Marked down the different paths it could lead him towards. Misty was hunched over on Jackie’s couch and V decided then to make his words cut as much as they can because her pain was vivid and honest and bright. He thinks if he makes her bleed too, cuts her open, lays all that hurt bare he'll be able to figure out how it works and coach the small burning thing in his chest to something bigger and even more real. Give it a shape, a meaning.
Mama Reyes’ took him into the bar instead and sat with him until his hands stop shaking.
There are roads not taken. There are curtains fluttering in the evening wind. There is blood soaking into V’s knees, like soft, dark dirt. Witnessing what a .690 bullet can do to the inside of someone’s head is enough of a reason to never get too close. It’s easier to pick yourself back up if you don’t give a shit.
He relearns this lesson as soon as Jackie’s red slicked hands grasp his own in the backseat of the Delamain. And then again when he kisses Evelyn to feel something real, just to find her bleached cold and empty in Judy’s bathtub.
“What do we mean when we speak of ourselves?” Judy asks him, later, knees tucked to her chest on her deck chair.
The rain has started to let up, finally, misting the air into something quiet and cool. “None of us are who we are even a year ago,” she says. “Do we just mean here and now? Or are we all doomed to become unrecognizable eventually?”
Johnny’s standing by the roof’s edge, just a slip of black against a greater dark. The rings on his fingers flash in the falling dusk, where they twitch like he needs something far bigger than a cigarette.
“I’m different to the kid in Laguna Bend or who I was before finding the Moxes. I’m not the same girl Evelyn loved. Or the me I was before I met you. But I wouldn’t be who I am now without those pasts,” she says. “Especially the parts I wish weren’t mine.”
She and Johnny stare across at the city for a very long time. V looks at his hands, folded in his lap.
“If you had your life to live all over again, would you make the same decisions?” she asks him.
“No,” V answers quick, as honest as he knows how to be.
Johnny turns to look at him, his eyes nothing but burning embers in the dusk.
—
He wakes up the next morning to the sun streaming through his blinds and a missed call from Kerry.
V’s been ruminating at the unexpected sting of being on the wrong side of a one-night stand, so he intends to make his excuses and let Kerry down with a simple get fucked. But feeling a clean, warm light on his skin shifts something inside of him, smooths down the line of shoulders.
That evening he’s standing in front of a boat, and it’ll be the last time V underestimates just how fast Kerry Eurodyne can move if he’s been given a goal.
Kerry reaches out his hand. “Lemme help you aboard, like a gentleman.”
This close up, the harbor smells just enough like what V imagines the sea should smell like to put him at ease. He’s never been on water before, and a large part of him resists stepping off the pier.
“No one who grabs my ass like that is a gentleman,” V says, finding his feet on the bobbing deck. It’s enough to know that Kerry’s smiling.
Hours later, they watch the boat aflame on the water from the shore, feet digging into the wet sand. The flames reflect on the water and V can feel two points of heat. On his face from the fire like a bruise and on his knee where Kerry’s knocks against him.
“I sincerely hope this makes the screamsheets,” Kerry says, darkly. But he takes V’s offered hand, smooth palm against his own, the slide of warm, sandy fingers, a scrape of rings like electricity.
V pulls him up, a moment with only inches between them and he breathes him in, fading cologne with the smell of petrol and salt. Then Kerry slips away, making his way back down the beach. V watches him move, a dark shape with flashing eyes that he can feel on him like the heart of a star.
V feels winded when they get into the car, like he’s been on the run all night. They dress quietly, even if he couldn't stop looking at the way Kerry’s muscles move as he drapes a towel around his neck, the curve of his biceps and the slip of his waist. Everything about Kerry has become distracting in a way it hadn't been. It’s dangerous in a way V hadn’t anticipated.
As he drives, the highway lights cast the interior of the car in sodium-yellow light. The air gutters between night and day, light and dark, and here, in V’s passenger seat, Kerry finally looks untouchable in a way that he hadn’t ever since he had him up against his shower wall with a gun under his chin. He looks remote and inscrutable beyond measure, finally become the man V read about in the screamsheets as a kid.
It shouldn’t surprise him that Kerry isn’t any different to the city that created him. That just when you think you’ve got it right where you want it, it slips right out of your grip, harder to catch than before, knowing all your tricks.
V shifts his grip on the wheel. He can feel his heart beat in his chest, right under his ribs, where all the soft parts of him still are. He doesn’t know what he wants with Kerry, but it isn’t this. His whole life is defined by abstractions, by constructs, engrams, barely-theres, futures that are slipping away with every klick of the speedometer as he speeds away faster from his death, not wanting to believe that the fastest way down is the shortest way round. He wants something real, for once. Something fucking real.
Before he realizes it, his hand is moving the gears down in a quick clack-clack-clack. The car skids to the side of the underpass, and in the sudden shadow he feels instead of hears Kerry’s sharp intake of breath next to him as he grabs for the dashboard. The sound surprises them both.
He turns off the engine and pauses in his seat, one hand still on the gearshift. His stomach swoops with nervous energy. Got butterflies, padron, he can hear Jackie say, teasing.
V can hardly bear to look at Kerry, but his control falters when he hears him exhale. The ambient glow from the radio catches Kerry’s eyes, his bleached hair, as if the memory of him was already caught in amber. Kerry looks uncertain, too, in the moment. Then somebody moves, and V will never know who it was, but it doesn’t matter.
Kerry clambers over the middle console, feet getting caught in the seat belt. His knee comes down hard into V’s thigh, but then they both shift their weight, and V’s eyes shut at the feel of Kerry in his lap, pooling warm and liquid in his gut.
And V’s on a comedown from the fire, the adrenaline, fuck, all of it, but he feels lightheaded, left burning by the the path of Kerry’s mouth down the length of V’s throat like rocket fuel seeking oxygen. V shifts against the seat, hands palming Kerry’s back. Kerry’s fingers dig neatly into his hips as if he thinks V is going to run. V won’t. This is something that he wants.
But he doesn't know what Kerry wants, doesn't care, just wants to get something that feels good for once, and he kisses Kerry because he can. Kerry’s mouth is hot, wet, and V bites his lip just to hear the sound he makes. Kerry mutters something obscene into his mouth, but it disappears, without sound, and shapes itself into a groan as V wrestles with Kerry’s belt, his zipper, shoves a hand inside Kerry’s pants and wraps it around his cock.
Kerry pulls away from V’s mouth, teeth closing on the hinge of his jaw, and then his mouth is bared against V’s throat as V twists his wrist, the grip probably painful, probably ugly and hard and too much, but it’s needed.
Kerry works at V’s waistband, hands clumsy for once which makes V laugh, but then his hand is around him, hot and just dry enough for V to wince, for him to know he’ll feel it in the morning. V twists his free hand in Kerry’s hair, rough, and kisses him quiet, then kisses him loud all over again.
He thinks of blood mixing with gasoline in the gutters when he pushes inside Kerry for the second time, sinking deep against the pain-pleasure of it all.
For once, Johnny is quiet.
—
“You make them nervous,” says every fixer he’s ever had.
“They ought to be nervous,” is what he says, if they’re brave enough to say it, if they aren’t so nervous themselves that he reads it in their glances and the twitches of their trigger finger and the way they fold their arms and cross their legs and lean back in their chairs, just a little out of his reach.
There’s a moment of silence that follows, usually. A moment he can never get back, after this conversation in a half dozen rooms, where he’s the unknown variable but those that hire him want to believe that he isn’t, that he’s under control, and he listens to the clock on the wall ticking and the beat of his own heart and the too-fast breath of the bodyguard and guards’ guards and he waits and he waits and he times it just right.
“They should be nervous,” he says, and slides back in his chair, bares his throat, and it’s never a gesture of surrender. “But not of me.”
Because’s he’s got a killer in his head, and some days he doesn’t know if Johnny’s killing him too or making him into something else. Not better, but bigger, greater than who he was before.
A curious thing happens when you’re told you’re not gonna make it past 26 on your 25th birthday. It’s like something unlocks in your head, the universe shrugging off its wisdom it usually hands to people four times your age because, hey, this poor bastard’s already six feet under anyway.
So he’s given the wisdom earned in death but he’s still only 25 and he can’t hear anything but the blood in his head and a rising whine-like panic at the back of his throat like a dog backed into a corner, animal-like, a tidal wave about to crash and when it breaks, it breaks. It just breaks, levelling the world as it was with nothing but a ringing stillness. He can’t even hear his own blood now.
Then he’s just a kid with nothing to lose. And at first, like most things do, it feels like a freedom.
Feels like two in the morning. Feels like being taut but ready, tense but anticipating. He thinks that this is it. This is really it. Time for his first go of the show. He checks the time again, checks the date again, and then checks his steps.
His father struggles underneath V’s hands. It's not particularly violent, but it's not particularly clean.
V is young, inexperienced, led by rage. He'll learn to be better. Lemon, salt water, hydrogen peroxide, bleach. V knows what they feel like on his skin.
He just didn’t account what it would do to his mother. A year later and he watches the curtains flutter in the open window, and it’s his first lesson.
After that, the Old Testament violence from his childhood gains significance. The blood and bone and smoke from the thurible as it swings back and forth in the eternal afternoon. Sunday school taught him that the consolation was that Cain lives. He begs God to kill him, and God says, Son, that would be too easy. That wouldn’t do the lesson. You’re going to live. And you’re going to live in shame and isolation and at the fringe of all human worlds.
So V thinks, the night he stumbled into the road after Takemura dragged him out of the sucking mud, taillights trailing blood through the thick air, staring into the stars, on his knees, straining for a glimpse of his own future— well, this is his lesson. That’s what he’ll do — because he didn’t want to die, not at that point. He wanted to live, but you can’t live in a world without meaning. To be Cain is to be grandiose, but young men are always grandiose. They all think they’re at the center of their stories, even if it’s a bad one.
It’s why he can't remember his death. It’s not logical to want to believe your story can end, and there are seven hours he knows nothing about beyond a darkness. But it's written into the faces of everyone he sees. In the No Tell Motel CCTV feed Takemura hands over, the way Misty keeps to the other side of the room when she's alone with him and Viktor’s knuckles blanche on his knees, and the way strangers in the street will flick their eyes through V and away too quickly.
When he walked out of Vik’s clinic, with nothing but his own blood slicking a starched white collar of a klepted suit, a fat stack of eddies, and the whole of NC heaving before him, indifferent to the cataclysmic shock V had just stumbled out of, something deep inside of him shifts. Maybe it was the black spot on his soul finally be given a reason to grow, or maybe it was just the casting off of the hope that life could be good, one day, somewhere. Either way, it felt like relief.
Because V was normal until he wasn’t, invisible, until he wasn’t, but that’s not how life works and it’s not how this story goes.
There’s something inside him, deep beneath, blood-deep and bone-deep, marking him as not normal, not right. V doesn't know exactly when he realized this, but his story is mundane. It was somewhere between his father's absence and his mother's broken promises, broken spirit, broken bottles and the window she threw herself through, 89 floors high.
At school, he felt detached, as though he was looking at the world from a distant plateau. He's just old enough and smart enough to know that he doesn't experience things in the same way as people around him. He rests his hand heavy on his best friend’s shoulder, sees the comfort drawn from it and doesn't understand it. Jackie feels everything. Too much, in V’s opinion. But that doesn't mean his opposite extreme is the right way either.
Structure is his cure.
There are rules, guidelines, expectations in mercenary work, and if he forces himself inside of them then he's certain that he can get the thing that he was born without.
Or close enough, at least, for everyone but him. He had come to terms with the darkness inside him long before his soon-to-be death. And that’s where the real story starts.
—
"I hate the desert” V says, even though it's not the truth.
Segundo to Romero, then back south again, straddling the state border and hitting more and more brush, roads so overgrown you'd need a tank to get through. In the distance, the purple-black mass of the Sierra Nevadas hovers over them, huge and heavy and thickly shrouded in blue-violet mist, bushland gently sloping between. The silence out here is almost thundering, the blue light of dusk buzzing V’s bones.
Panam nudges his shoulder with her own. “City boys,” she dismisses. “Terrified to get a bit of sand in their boots.”
“It’s not the sand,” he says. He lifts a hand, arcs a finger over the horizon. “It’s the distance.”
Out here, the eye stretches to the horizon and must continue up. Anything past the horizon is invisible, can only be imagined. He wants to see the future but he can only see the sky. There’s only the road, and there’s the story of where the road goes, back towards the roar of the freeway, the roar of the city engulfing everything. In the city he can breathe. But out here, there’s nowhere to stop, nowhere to look back, not even at the rest stop, in the diners on the outskirts of town, the overpasses, the water’s edge, the side of the road where the jackson trees grow.
The desert reminds him that he’s dead yet, not exactly— parts of him are dead already, certainly other parts are waiting for something to happen, something final, but it isn’t always about him, he keeps saying, though he’s talking about the only soul he knows.
His, yours, both souls are true, Misty reprimands him when he starts talking like that.
Panam asks what he’s thinking when he looks at the sky like that.
“Like what?” he says.
“Like you’re already lost to this world,” she says, her wrist flicking the gears down with ease.
What can he tell her? What could he possibly tell anyone? Not a single thing in this world isn’t in the process of becoming something else. He’s just not sure what it is he’s becoming, and that's the truth of the matter.
“We were neither what we had been nor what we would become once we reached our destination,” she recites, an answer to question he hadn’t asked, so quiet it’s almost lost to the roar of the night fast approaching.
—
He’s in Mark 24, looking at the cases of beer under buzzing fluorescent lights, and he doesn’t know it then but he’ll fuck Kerry for the first time that night not even a mile off the coast, plastic blistering under the flames, the metal of the walls burning under his hands.
He fucks him for the second time in his car under an overpass in Kabuki.
There are reasons for it. This V is sure of, because V doesn’t let things happen without a reason, an objective, an advantage to the cost, alternative options, scores, the bite-marks Kerry left on V’s hips and the pass of his stomach as Johnny watched, blowing smoke out slow between his teeth. There are reasons for it. There is logic in the events somewhere.
Somewhere.
V spends months trying to find it.
Tries to find it in tripwire hours between gigs, in the afterparties at Kerry’s that become the radio turned low while V glimpses at him through the crowd, Kerry always deep in conversation with someone else. That’s how Kerry is. He knows how to talk to people, knows how to make them laugh and look just sincere enough to fool people he’s listening. He’s magic at parties. He’s magic at most things.
Tries to find it at 4am when the crowds have dwindled enough to find the two of them caught in the shadows, nervous with intent.
When Kerry takes off the guitars on his wall and tells V to choose one, but V never accepts a gift from anyone, so Kerry leaves them as they are, on the floor, already forgotten. The house is dark, the beer bottles glowing sodium green in the night, and the tv is playing the news on mute. The doors are thrown open, just like when V first met him.
The pool reflection moves slow on the ceiling. Kerry’s stretched out on the couch, pressing a water bottle from the fridge to his neck in the unseasonable heat. His head turns as V sits down next to him, eyes following the path of V’s hand where it stops just short of his thigh.
"What's it like?" Kerry asks, and V feels Johnny lower the lights of his mind, unconscious control, and god, he would have killed for that, once upon a time.
"Do you really want to know?" He can still feel Johnny’s fingers grip his arm, bruising, right but not quite.
Kerry shrugs, staring up at the ceiling. Johnny does it so easily, so naturally, and before now, V never knew, none of them knew. Kerry doesn't know, either, V thinks, how much he can feel him.
"What’s it like,“ Kerry waves at his head, Night City, outside, everywhere, pressing in on all sides. “Knowing you’ve died once and he’s trying to kill you again?”
There are so many ways to answer that, and so few that would make sense, even to Kerry.
"It's not like before," he says.
It's better. It's different. It's wrong. Reaching out, he touches Kerry’s ankle, feels the instinctive flinch, stay, stay,, tamped down on a draw of breath. Skin and heat, bone beneath. He circles his ankle with his thumb, running it slowly up his calf.
“I have an idea of who I was, the man I should be.” Settling a palm over Kerry’s knee, he pauses. "But nothing feels right. His memories feel more real than my own. I don’t know the difference anymore.”
It suddenly becomes necessary for Kerry to understand him. It shouldn't be, but it is. He'd never thought he'd need this. “Like mutation,” he says, and he feels Kerry’s gaze sharpen. “Like becoming something else.”
Kerry’s mouth opens to say something —something quick and sarcastic, something to break the second that his body relaxed against V’s hand, but it shuts again. V leans back and draws his hand away. He doesn’t have the time, but he realizes can be patient for this.
Kerry brings the flame to the cigarette dangling between his lips, and then exhales, the smoke clouding the air between them. And V’s been drunk for hours, but the burn in his chest is all Kerry’s doing. Kerry leans back against the couch, and rubs a palm between his spread thighs, fingers counting every tooth on his zipper.
Kerry’s blue eyes flash a cold heat through the smoke as he laughs.
His laugh. That’s what V learned about him first. The growl of it, quick to come, but edged with aggression like someone’s taught him that the best defense is a strong offense. The way it gets into his space and burns out all the oxygen in the room before he can steel himself against it. The same way Kerry slouches like he was told once he was too tall and he believed it. He’s inches shorter than V but still takes up all the space in the room, so maybe they were goddamn right.
Because there is time, and then there is time spent together.
At first, it unnerves V in the way an animal stroked the wrong way would, used to the worst in sharing his space with someone new. He never intended to get this close. He never intended a lot of things with Kerry. Sometimes V doesn’t know if that’s the old, kinder self in him, or if Johnny’s rewiring him to indulge him, them, the three of them.
He doesn’t know, but it doesn’t matter in the nights where he’s got Kerry under him, skin wet from a midnight swim and the champagne V’s poured, his tongue lapping up the bubbles from his navel, Kerry’s throat bobbing.
And that’s a third thing V’s gotten close enough to know. How his throat cybernetics are built with a bio-plastic V’s only heard whispered about in theory, a material designed to twist and bend with its owner.
“This is what you expected when you got this done, huh?” V asks, moving quick, thighs braced on either side of Kerry’s torso and hands pressed in the metal hollow of his throat.
V leans down and his teeth scrape on the metallic planes warmed by body-temperature, feeling the low vibration of a growl under his tongue. His fingers drag from the buzzed hair at Kerry’s nape and finds the notches in his skull, presses into the cochlear implants. Kerry groans beneath him, and V slides his hands down his chest, fingering the grooves from where he’s got new lungs and better diaphragm, but the same heart that he loved Johnny with. He digs his fingers into the grooves, tongue cruel in how he laps up Kerry’s gasps he feels more than hears.
Kerry’s brand new spine arches under his palms and V is learning just how flexible it makes him. V runs his hands over Kerry’s torso, the inside of his thighs. Years of skin regeneration has wiped away scars, but his body must remember every blow, every cut, every kiss. V isn’t naive enough to think he’s made him come more than anyone that’s come before. He isn’t naive enough to think he knows more of what lies under that skin than any wife, any bandmate, any lover.
He has the impulse to pry his hands under Kerry’s sternum. There might be something that that all the others missed.
The thought gets him hard in his jeans. He can feel his heartbeat everywhere: his cock, his temples, his belly, the deep low place where arousal makes him ache.
“Come here,” Kerry murmurs, pitching forward, and his hands make the slow descent up V’s stomach to touch bare skin.
It’s like nothing he’s experienced before - all intent for one purpose. All the air in his lungs is exhaled like a gut punch, and he’s only half-aware of Kerry pulling him down, the couch dipping under their joined weight. V’s heart races and he drops the rest of the way down, until his hands come up around Kerry’s head and they are panting just because they are touching.
Every nerve in his body is on fire, and he grinds down into the damp heat between them. He thought the sex would come easy. He thought it would get something out of his system. But on the come up every touch is rougher with desperation, with the thought that this is of finite supply. When Kerry licks a path up his neck his vision whites out.
When V comes to, Kerry is kissing him: deep, languid, almost lazily, and V has never felt so cheated in his life.
“Fuck,” V nearly laughs, head dropping onto Kerry’s shoulder. He takes a moment to collect his breath, the ringing in his ears slowly subsiding.
He rides the comedown, easy, until he looks down and sees blood pooling onto Kerry’s skin.
His gaze snaps up, but his hand is too late to cover his nose before Kerry notices.
“The fuck—“ Kerry begins.
“It’s fine.”
He pushes himself off Kerry, glancing at his comms queue. “I gotta delta. I got about five clients crying about meeting me right the fuck now,” V says, shoving himself to standing.
“It’s five in the morning,” Kerry says, his face the perfect picture of affronted beyond belief.
“I got a reputation to maintain. Always get the job done.”
“Then get the job done, right here,” Kerry says, nearly growling, pants half open and straining beneath him.
V sways forward, nearly convinced. But he turns his heels instead, shrugs on his jacket.
But as he’s walking to the door, he finds himself shoved to the wall, the back of his head almost hitting the stone. Almost a perfect mirror of how V had Kerry when they first met.
Kerry takes him into a deep, searching kiss. It’s less violent than it is dangerous, a hand pressed firmly against the back of his neck. Breaking the kiss, Kerry tips V’s head down with such a sharp scrutiny V flinches.
Kerry’s fingers find the biochip port, and he says, “Let me help you.”
The moment stretches until V’s hurting to breathe. For some reason, he forgets to inhale. Fuck, he realizes.
Even when he knew he was dead, he never felt in over his head like this. It didn’t even come close. So V doesn’t give Kerry an answer, because he’s already shouldering his way out the door, and he doesn’t realize he was holding his breath, waiting for something, someone, anything to stop him, until he’s on the drive and the cool dawn air smacks like a penance.
“Careful, kid,” Johnny says, flickering into space. “Nothing’s ever free. Not even this.”