Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

V had never believed in horoscopes.

Not in the daily column wedged between the crossword and the obituaries in NC Journal, not in the little laminated cards Misty kept by the register at Esoterica, not in the app Vincent had downloaded on her phone as a joke three years ago that she'd never gotten around to deleting.

She didn't believe in the alignment of planets as a force shaping human destiny any more than she believed in the benevolence or charity of large corporations, the impartiality of NCPD, or the nutritional claims on the back of AllFoods Soypak.

She was, as she would have described herself, a realist. Possibly a pessimist. Definitely the kind of person who paid her rent in cash and kept a backup exit from every room she walked into, including her own apartment.

None of which had done her a single goddamn bit of good tonight.

The night of April 16th, 2013 was the night V seriously began reconsidering her stance on celestial mechanics. It wasn't a gradual thing — there was no slow dawning, no gentle epistemological shift. The reconsideration arrived all at once, sudden and total, the way water arrived when the hull of a ship gave out.

She'd seen Misty earlier.

Her friend, who smelled like palo santo and talked to her crystals, who had once spent forty-five minutes explaining to V the emotional memory stored in a piece of rose quartz, who was — and V maintained this with great affection — completely and utterly out of her mind.

She’d grabbed V's wrist on her way out the door with an expression that belonged to someone delivering bad prophecy.

"Stellium in Aries," she'd said. "Mars conjunct Sun. V, please be careful tonight."

Whatever the hell a "stellium" was supposed to be, V had filled it away with healing crystals and mercury retrograde. She had no idea what the fuck it even meant nor had any willingness to explore secrets of the universe through tarot spreads but now, as she stared down the barrel of her current situation, she had to admit Misty's woo-woo warnings had landed uncomfortably close to the mark.

She might have been onto something.

Was it a self-fulfilling prophecy? The power of suggestion? The genuine and terrifying influence of celestial bodies on the trajectory of human lives? V had no idea. What she knew — with the cold, intimate clarity of arriving very suddenly at the bottom of a situation — was this:

She was utterly, spectacularly, almost impressively fucked.

It had started, as most of her problems did, with a low-end gig from a man who wanted very badly to think of himself as a fixer.

He was not a fixer. He was, at best, the lowest link in Night City's criminal food chain, conducting business out of a booth at a diner he didn't own and using words like "acquisition" and "asset retrieval" to describe what was, functionally, fetch-questing. His name was Flacco, he had a tattoo of a scorpion on his neck that he clearly thought was intimidating, and he had contracted V to obtain a data shard from an old man named Gerry who owed him something unspecified and was, according to Flacco, "not being cooperative about it."

The shard, Flacco had assured her, contained important information.

V had done enough of these jobs to have a working theory about what "important information" meant on Flacco's tier of the market. It usually meant blackmail material — somebody's spectacularly poor decisions captured in high resolution video format.

She was basically a courier for someone's porn collection.

Fucking pawnshop standoffs were more fun than this. She'd done three of those in the last month and at least she could laugh afterwards. This was just cardio with consequences.

Still, she couldn't afford to be picky. That was the thing she kept having to remind herself of. The rent was what it was, the electric bill was what it was, the clinic visits were what they were, mounting in frequency with an enthusiasm her nonexistent insurance plan absolutely did not share.

The gig had started well enough, in the technical sense that she had located Gerry without incident and had made her intentions — retrieval of property, minimal fuss, everyone goes home — reasonably clear.

Gerry had not been cooperative.

Gerry had, in fact, run.

The old man had looked at V, made some rapid internal calculation that did not account for how fast she actually was, and bolted — out of the parking lot, into the street with the energy of a man who had absolutely nothing to lose and also apparently the cardiovascular system of someone fifteen years younger than he looked.

V had chased him through three blocks of City Centre foot traffic, past a noodle cart she nearly took out at the knee, over a fence that her ankle painfully caught in, through an alley that smelled like something had died in it recently.

Then the district had locked down.

She'd felt it before she'd seen it — the shift in the street's rhythm, the distant sound of something that wasn't quite crowd noise and wasn't quite sirens but was somewhere between the two, spreading through the city the way bad news always did in Night City. Checkpoints bloomed at the district edges. Traffic rerouted. The whole of City Centre decided, collectively and without consulting V, that it was done being traversable for the evening.

Which meant she was stuck on the wrong side of a police cordon, on foot, with a throbbing ankle, a data shard she hadn't actually retrieved yet, and a very clear mental image of Vincent sitting up in their apartment with that expression he had — the one that was technically just his face but managed to communicate his disappointment with her in several different flavors.

She'd probably end up at the clinic again. Her ankle was without a doubt fucked — she didn't think it was broken, but it for sure was that insistent, petty injury that would kneecap her next two weeks and cost exactly enough to hurt without being serious enough to justify the hurt.

Flacco would probably dock her pay. He'd done it before, citing "timeline discrepancies" and "operational inefficiencies" in the tone of someone who had learned those words specifically for the purpose of paying people less.

Fuck's sake, V thought, with great feeling, pressing herself behind a dumpster as a pair of NCPD cruisers screamed past.

Somewhere across the city — closer than it had been, or maybe just louder — the music was still going.

Gerry — sixty-something, grey-haired, wearing a windbreaker that had no business surviving the speeds he was currently achieving — had just cleared the intersection at the far end of the block, arms pumping, looking back over his shoulder. Whatever was on that shard must have been worth dying for. He was moving fast for his age. V was going to have words with Flacco about the accuracy of his target assessments.

"Gerry!" The name came out ragged, stripped of any professional neutrality she'd been aiming for. "Gerry, wait— fuck—"

He didn't wait. He didn't even look back. Just put his head down and pumped his elbows like someone had told him his life depended on it, which, to be fair, he probably thought it did. V was going to have to work on her opening statements.

"I just want to talk!"

The music swallowed the last word whole.

It was coming from everywhere now, or it felt like it — bass frequencies she could register in her chest more than her ears, something with a lot of guitar and a lot of screaming that she couldn't quite resolve into individual sounds, just a wall of it rolling down the street and bouncing off the glass faces of the corporate mid-rises overhead. It had gotten louder in the last three minutes.

V rounded the corner and immediately had to swerve around a trash can someone had relocated to the middle of the sidewalk.

More cruisers. She saw them in her peripheral as she ran — two more than before, nosed up against a temporary barricade a block north, lights going. Someone on a loudhailer was saying something she couldn't parse over the music.

Bad time to be visible. Terrible time to be running, which, to the NCPD, was basically a signed confession.

She ducked around a knot of people who'd stopped moving entirely, necks craned, looking at something she didn't have time to look at. The crowd was too dense, too tight, a sea of people who hadn't decided yet whether they were watching something or participating in it. A bottle shattered somewhere to her left. Someone was yelling, words she couldn't make out under the music. A police car sat half-mounted on the curb two intersections up, lights strobing, the officer inside deciding the car was safer than the street.

Which was, V noted with the detached portion of her brain that kept running threat assessments even when the rest of her was occupied, not a great sign.

The rest of her was occupied catching Gerry.

He cut left into a side street and she followed, shaving the corner close enough to clip her shoulder on the building's edge, pain blooming sharp and immediate and ignored. Her ankle was pulsing with every stride.

"I swear to god, you old fucker—"

Gerry took a hard right into an alley opening so narrow V's shoulders nearly brushed both walls at once, and then he did the single most annoying thing a target had ever done to her in two years of doing this: he stopped.

It didn’t look as if he'd given up, nor like he'd run out of steam, though the sound he was making suggested his lungs had filed their own formal complaint. He stopped because there was nowhere left to go. A solid wall at the end of the alley, a dumpster shoved against it, a fire escape ladder rusted halfway up with the bottom rung missing. Gerry stood there with his hands on his knees, chest heaving, and stared at the dead end.

V stopped too — bent double, hands on her thighs.

For a moment they were just two people breathing very hard at each other in a dark alley.

Fuck Flacco. Fuck Flacco and his scorpion tattoo and his absolute failure to mention that the mark ran like a goddamn greyhound. Fuck Gerry too, while she was at it. Fuck Gerry and his windbreaker and whatever was on that shard that he apparently valued more than his health. Fuck the both of them. Fuck this entire night.

She should've just stayed in school.

This happened sometimes, in the silence that came right after something went wrong — the moment where the adrenaline hadn't fully cleared and the next problem hadn't fully arrived and there was just enough space for her brain to locate the memory of every better decision she hadn't made.

Vincent had wanted her to finish — that was the thing V kept coming back to, the detail that had the most retrospective weight to it. Vincent, who shared her face and her last name and somehow an entirely different relationship to the concept of long-term consequences, had sat across from her at their kitchen table numerous times and made the case with patience. He’d known he was losing the argument but felt morally obligated to try anyway.

Just try, he'd said. What’s one more year?

There was possibly a corp job on the other side of it, a health insurance that existed in a non-conceptual sense and a salary that arrived on a predictable schedule rather than in irregular chunks from shady men with shitty tattoos. A life in which an ankle sprain was not a problem she had to strategize around at — she checked — nine forty-seven at night while something burned somewhere nearby.

Alas, it was not meant to be — V wasn't built for cubicles, for hierarchy, for the soul-flattening geometry of a structured career path.

She still believed most of it. She couldn't even fully recant, couldn't surrender cleanly to the fantasy of the alternate timeline where she'd just listened, because some stubborn, correctly-calibrated part of her knew that the corp job would have been its own kind of tragedy, just better heated and with dental.

But also.

Her ankle hurt, she was stuck behind a police lockdown, and she was going to get paid less than agreed for a job she'd taken because she needed the money, which she needed because Night City had a relationship with the concept of affordable living that could only be described as hostile.

She’d been so fucking dumb. She should've just finished the fucking school.

The music across the city peaked suddenly — guitar, and a voice, and the distant compressed roar of what sounded like an actual crowd — and then, almost as suddenly, began to fracture. Something had interrupted it, as if the night had other plans.

V straightened up.

"Gerry." Her voice came out more tired than threatening, which was probably fine. Threatening hadn't worked. "I'm not going to hurt you."

As if she could. He'd just run her ragged across ten city blocks. Whatever was under that windbreaker, it wasn't just age and a workout plan — the man moved like he had at least a few thousand eurodollars of chrome keeping his joints honest. She'd have to remember to extort Flacco for the ankle.

She took a step toward him.

Gerry's head snapped up. He'd gotten his breathing under control faster than she had, which told her everything she needed to know about the chrome situation.

"Stay back." His voice was hoarse from the running but the warning in it was immediate, wired in. He straightened up — slower than he'd moved in the street, V noticed, the sprint having cost him something after all — and pointed a finger at her like it meant something. "You stay right the fuck there, you little shit."

V stopped. Held both hands out, palms open. The international gesture for I am not currently a threat, which she'd used enough times that it felt like muscle memory.

"Okay," she assured. "Okay, I'm staying. See? Staying."

"Don't give me that." He was still pointing. His chest was still heaving. "I know what this is. I know exactly what this is."

"Great," V sighed. "Then you know I just want the shard."

"Right." He laughed, short and ugly, like she'd said something deeply stupid. "The shard. That's the whole story they gave you?"

V opened her mouth. Closed it. Tried to locate the version of this conversation she'd been planning to have and found that Gerry had already taken it somewhere else entirely.

"Flacco sent me," she tried again, keeping her voice level. "That's it. That's the whole thing. Flacco wants his property back, you hand it over, I go home, you go home, everyone goes fucking home!"

"That's what they want you to think."

V stopped moving in his direction.

"...What?"

"You dumb fucking bitch." He straightened up, and the look he gave her was not the look of a cornered man. It was the look of a man who had decided she was the problem. "You think I don't know—" he made a gesture at her general existence that she found deeply offensive "— they sent you. I know they sent you."

"Guy with the scorpion tattoo sent me," she exasperated, slower, like maybe the issue was pacing. "Booth at the—"

"That's what they always tell you." He jabbed a finger in her direction. "You think it goes Flacco? It doesn't go Flacco. It goes Flacco to Militech to the board, and the board goes all the way up, and you—" another gesture, expansive, slightly unhinged "—you're just the hand they sent."

V looked at him. She looked at the wall behind him.

"Gerry," she said carefully. "I work for myself. I took a job from a guy whose criminal enterprise is, generously, a two out of ten. I am not a corporate operative. I am a person who needs to pay rent."

But Gerry just kept going — something about satellite arrays and behavioral modification frequencies and a data architecture that went, if V was parsing this correctly, from Flacco's diner booth all the way up to a shadow council that apparently ran three of the major corps from a building that didn't officially exist. Something about signal interference and planted operatives and a network that apparently stretched all the way to the upper floors of Arasaka Tower, which, if true, would mean V was both the most underpaid corporate asset in the history of Night City and also the only one currently standing in an alley with a throbbing ankle and forty-three eddies in her account.

The old man had specifics and what sounded like a timeline. He had, V was increasingly certain, a whole system worked out, the kind that took real dedicated hours of forum-scrolling and red-string-on-a-corkboard energy to construct. The windbreaker, she now understood, was not incidental — it was the outfit of a man who had been ready to run for a long time.

V stood there with her hands still loosely raised and let the words wash over her. Oh, he was one of those.

She'd met a few. Everyone had. The guy at the convenience store who'd started explaining chemtrails at her while she was trying to buy a sandwich. The woman in the laundromat who'd known that the water recyclers in Heywood were being used to distribute something. Vincent had briefly gone through a phase in his early teens, downloading manifestos and annotating them with genuine intellectual investment, before he'd apparently grown out of it and redirected the energy into something more useful.

Gerry had not grown out of it. Gerry had, if anything, grown further into it with every passing year, like a tree whose roots had found an aquifer and decided that was the direction now.

V tipped her head back and looked at the sky.

The alley opened onto a narrow strip of sky overhead, City Centre's towers boxing it into a jagged corridor, and what sky there was had that Night City feature of being lit from below rather than above — orange-brown, light-polluted, the stars completely theoretical. Somewhere up there, allegedly, planets were aligning in ways that Misty had tried to warn her about. Stellium in Aries. Mars conjunct Sun.

V was just so tired.

Then Gerry hit her with the windbreaker.

That was — that was what happened. She'd been staring at the sky having her moment of existential dread and Gerry had apparently decided that the window of opportunity was now. He lunged at her with all sixty-something years of him and the first thing that connected was the arm of his windbreaker, whipping across her face with a plasticky slap that was more insulting than painful.

Her shoulder hit the alley wall. She bounced off it.

"What the fuck—"

She stumbled back. He came at her again, both hands out, and she got her arms up on instinct, which meant she swatted his wrist hard enough to make him yelp and then they were both off-balance and grabbing at each other in the dark. V had genuinely not prepared for this exact development.

"Give it—" He made a grab for her t-shirt, got a fistful of the hem. V twisted, but he held on as if he had been doing grip-strength exercises for the last thirty years out of pure spite.

"Gerry—"

"You're not taking it—"

"I don't even have it yet—"

He shoved. V was taller but the angle was wrong and her ankle chose that moment to remind her it existed, buckling just slightly. V went sideways into the wall with her shoulder again and came off it swinging — not a punch, not even close to a punch, more of a panicked flailing motion that connected with nothing but air and made her feel like an idiot.

Gerry was already moving. Not running — he'd apparently decided it was the end of running — but circling, getting between her and the alley entrance, which, fine, strategically fine, he was cutting off her exit, except he was also sixty-something in a windbreaker and V was —

V looked down at herself for one stupid half-second.

Black leggings. Cropped top. Hair half-falling out of the thing she'd put it in three hours ago. If anyone was watching this — if there was a single person at either end of this alley observing the situation — she was going to have to move cities.

"You need to stop," she stressed, hands up again, backing up a step.

"I’ll fucking kill you," Gerry bit back, which was a deeply unimpressive comeback, but he said it with conviction, and he had his fists raised in a way that suggested he'd taken a class sometime in the last decade. The chrome in him was doing something — V could see the way he was distributing his weight, too deliberate to be natural, some kind of combat assist running.

Great. Conspiracy theorist with combat chrome. This was the job.

He jabbed at her.

V leaned back and the fist went past her ear as she grabbed his arm on the way by, purely on reflex, and they spun — actually spun, like some kind of terrible dance.

Then Gerry hit her in the face. It wasn’t a glancing blow, not the windbreaker slap from before — a real one. A closed fist, short and ugly, catching her across the cheekbone with the full weight of whatever the chrome in his arm was doing for him. V's head snapped sideways, her vision going white at the edges. She hit the alley wall again, this time with her back and just— stayed there for a second. Just stayed there.

Her cheek was on fire, pulsing in time with her heartbeat, her eye watering immediately and involuntarily. She tasted copper on the inside of her lip where her teeth had connected with it.

Something shifted. V felt it go — the part of her that had been trying to be reasonable, trying to be professional, trying to de-escalate this with some dignity intact. It went cleanly, like a switch. The part that replaced it didn't have a name she liked. It was something that didn't consult the part of her that was still processing the fact of the impact, just put her upright because that was the only option that didn't end with her dying in an alley in City Centre. She got her feet under her and came up fast, already moving before she'd decided to move, before she'd done anything as structured as think.

Gerry came at her again and she moved differently this time, lower, not backing up. He swung but she wasn't where the swing expected her to be. She got inside his reach and shoved — both hands, all her weight, no technique, just force. He was already off-balance from the miss, going backward hard, staggering, arms out, as his heel caught on something — a crack in the concrete, the lip of the dumpster's base, V never figured out which — then he went down sideways.

The sound was wrong.

It wasn't just the sound of a man falling. It was — sharper than that. A crack that wasn't just the impact of a body hitting ground, and then a sound that was almost nothing, the near-silence of something that had stopped abruptly.

The old man was on the ground and he wasn't moving.

His head — V looked at where his head was, against the base of the alley wall where the concrete met the corner of the dumpster's metal frame, and there was — there was something dark spreading out from underneath it, catching what little light filtered down from the street above. She thought stupidly that he spilled something.

That was all. She just stood there, the alley didn't change, Gerry didn't get up, the dark wet thing kept spreading in the seam between the concrete and the dumpster's base, the music from somewhere across the city kept going like none of this had happened.

Well, she hadn't meant to do that.

That was the thought that arrived first, and it was so inadequate that it almost made her laugh, except nothing in her was anywhere near laughing. She'd just shoved him — both hands, no calculation, just the raw animal fact of not dying in an alley, and he'd gone backward, his heel had caught on something, the angle had been wrong, and now Gerry was on the ground with his head against the corner of a dumpster and V was standing three feet away from him with her hands still out in front of her like they belonged to someone else.

She should check if he was alive.

That was the next thought. Obvious, clinical, and arriving approximately four seconds too late. She should go over there and check, so she did — she made herself close the three feet between them and crouch down next to him in the dark, fingers going to his neck on pure autopilot. There was a pulse. Slow and steady and entirely unbothered by the chaos it had just put her through, Gerry's heart was beating away under her fingertips.

He was unconscious, bleeding from the head, but breathing.

She sat back on her heels and let out a breath that came out longer than she'd expected.

Okay. So she hadn't killed him. That was— that was the best possible version of the last thirty seconds. She hadn't killed a conspiracy theorist in a City Centre alley over some insignificant data shard. The night still retained some luck.

Then the sirens got louder.

Not the ambient city-noise sirens she'd been tuning out for the last twenty minutes. These were directional, and they were getting nearer by the second. V could hear the pitch shift as they turned somewhere close — one street over, maybe two — and the blue strobe light that had been a distant flicker at the alley entrance was suddenly more than a flicker. It was starting to paint the wall above her head in pulses.

She stood up very slowly.

There was an unconscious, bleeding man on the ground. The shard was presumably on his person somewhere, which meant she'd have to search him, which meant she'd have to stay in this alley for another thirty seconds minimum, which meant—

The blue light pulsed again. Closer.

Run, said one part of her brain.

Hide, said another part. Stay still, don't move, you're already in the alley, the alley is dark, they haven't turned in yet—

She was going to get the shard, she was going to get out, she was going to go home and tell Vincent absolutely nothing about this and then she was going to sleep for twelve hours and never work for Flacco again in her life. She was going to do all of those things in exactly that order. She was going to—

The sirens were not passing through, they were stopping. V could hear it — the shift from Doppler to stationary, the sound that had found its destination. Somewhere at the end of the alley or the street beyond it or the whole block, the NCPD had arrived and parked and were in the process of becoming her problem.

Something hit the alley entrance at speed.

Something that moved like a person who had been moving very fast and had run out of choices, which she recognized because she'd been that person twenty minutes ago and the body language was unmistakable — the forward lean, the momentum being converted into a stumble, one hand catching the wall to stay upright and not quite managing it. The figure came through the entrance at an angle and nearly went down, caught itself, straightened up and—

Stood there.

V didn't move.

The man didn't move either.

He was breathing hard. She could hear it from where she was, ragged and effortful, the sound of someone who had been running for longer than she had and had taken something along the way that running alone didn't account for. There was blood on his face — V could see it even in the bad light, dark against his cheekbone. His jacket — leather, black, the kind of thing you wore when you wanted people to know something about you — was torn at the shoulder. His knuckles, when she looked at his hand braced against the wall, were bloody and bruised.

V looked at the man against the wall. She looked at the alley entrance. She looked at the man again.

Oh, the cruiser wasn't looking for her at all.

He turned his head and found her in the dark with the immediate precision, risk assessment running very hot, and for a half-second they just looked at each other. His eyes went to Gerry on the ground. Back to her. To the blood on the concrete. Back to her face.

V watched him clock it all. She watched him clock her.

She was doing the same thing, she realized. Running the same rapid inventory — height, which was considerable, he had a solid half-foot on her; build, which was lean but not slight; the dark hair that was damp at the temples from the running; the beard, several days past the required shave. The split above his eye was bleeding in a patient, unhurried way that suggested it had been bleeding for a while.

V had a feeling she knew him.

Not personally, probably. Not — she couldn't place it, couldn't grasp the memory, but the face was not a stranger's face. Something about it landed with the low-grade wrongness of a word she knew but couldn't spell, a song she recognized from the first three notes but couldn't name. She'd seen him somewhere. Recently. Maybe not recently. She had the face and she didn't have the context. It was the most inconvenient possible moment to have her brain refuse to cooperate.

He was also — and she was furious at whatever misfiring synapse had chosen this exact moment, with Gerry unconscious and bleeding three feet away and a police car parked at the alley entrance — he was objectively, aggressively, almost offensively attractive.

Which was — irrelevant. Completely irrelevant. She filed it immediately under things that did not matter and returned her attention to the part where there was a police team somewhere nearby.

The attractive man pushed off the wall and moved toward her. V took an automatic step back before she registered that he wasn't moving like a threat, he was moving like someone who had also run out of room and had decided to make that her problem too.

"Hey." Low, urgent, and — southern, she registered. Genuinely, unmistakably southern, a drawl that had no business existing in Night City and arrived with the mild unreality of someone speaking a language she hadn't expected. "Hey, darlin', hold on—"

"Don't—"

"You're in trouble same as me." He got between her and the alley entrance with two long strides, not blocking her exactly but filling the space in a way that amounted to the same thing, and V had the brief, furious thought that he was taller than she'd clocked from across the alley. "Don't take it personal."

"Get out of my way—"

"Police’s right there." His eyes cut to the alley entrance and back. "They run your face, they run mine, we're both havin’ a worse night than we already are."

The blue light swept the alley wall above them. Closer. She could hear boots now, under the idling engine — the rhythm of someone getting out of a vehicle. The math was the same math it had been sixty seconds ago except now it was worse.

V looked at the light. Looked at him. Looked at the light again.

She was already forming something — a plan, some version of one, the rough shape of one where she could move deeper into the alley, get behind the dumpster, stay low, wait it out — and she could see him arriving at the same general territory from a different direction, both of them running the same equation and coming up against the same answer, which was that the alley was not deep enough and there was no cover that would hold. Gerry was still on the ground bleeding in a way that was going to be extremely difficult to explain.

V never got to finish the thought.

He moved first. That was what happened. He moved first by maybe three seconds, which was the gap between him deciding and her deciding, and in those three seconds he closed the remaining distance between them — not fast, not slow, simply committed to the only possible way out of this situation. His hand found her jaw, her back met the wall, his mouth found hers and none of it was gentle.

It wasn't a movie kiss. It wasn't careful or coordinated, his lip was split and V tasted blood that wasn't hers, her hands went to his chest on pure reflex and she'd needed to push except she didn't push, she just— held on, fingers curling into the leather of his jacket, because he was in front of her and the blue light was sweeping the alley entrance now, the footsteps getting closer. The part of her brain that was still running assessment on her chances of survival made a rapid and humiliating calculation and arrived at a conclusion this was the play.

V kissed him back.

She kissed back her stranger and she brought her hand up to the back of his neck. She felt him register it — a small shift in him, something adjusting slightly, like he'd expected resistance and gotten surprised — and then neither of them were thinking about it anymore because the footsteps stopped at the alley entrance.

One officer, maybe two, the weight redistributing — someone pausing, assessing.

Fuck it.

V got a leg up.

She just hooked her knee against his hip and pushed. Her stranger caught on with a speed that suggested either very good instincts or a genuinely alarming amount of experience, his hands going to her ass and taking her weight against the wall like they'd rehearsed it, like this was something they did on a daily basis, like they hadn't been trying to figure out each other's threat level approximately ninety seconds ago. The new development had it that she was now eye-level with him. He smelled like sweat and cigarettes and something metallic that was probably blood. V could feel the heat radiating off him through the leather. She decided none of that was relevant information and ground against him instead.

The moan she uttered was a masterpiece. Conservatory-level work. A triumph of applied craft. She was making a sound that she had never made in good faith in her life, the kind of sound that existed in porn and in the imagination of people who hadn't actually— the point was it was loud enough to carry and it was doing its job. She could feel the stranger go very still for exactly one second, which she did not have time to analyze.

He made a low sound against her mouth that was not a moan. It was more of a grunt, short and involuntary, that came from somewhere that didn't consult the conscious mind first. It went directly to the part of her brain that was supposed to be running some emergency plan and disrupted the signal completely.

Oscar-worthy. Both of them. Absolutely unhinged.

"—nothing, just a couple—" The officer's voice carried, bored and slightly disgusted in equal measure. The beam of a flashlight swept the alley wall somewhere above their heads and kept moving.

V didn't look. Looking would be the wrong move.

"Hey." The officer's voice, flat and tired. "Hey, you two."

The stranger broke the kiss first, pulling back just far enough to look at her — and for one disorienting half-second she was looking directly at him at extremely close range. Whatever expression was on his face was not one she had a category for.

Then he turned his head toward the officer with the practiced ease of someone who was used to being interrupted. He pulled back just far enough. Not far — kept her bracketed against the wall, his silver cybernetic forearm resting above her shoulder. V could feel his breath on her lips. She kept her eyes on the middle distance like she was recalibrating from the interruption, like she was annoyed at the intrusion, which required almost no acting at all.

"Officer." The drawl was doing something entirely different when he wasn't whispering. It was unhurried and warm in a way that seemed almost engineered to be disarming. "Sorry. Didn't realize we'd strayed."

V made herself look at the officer too. Patrolman, young — younger than her, maybe — with a slightly overwhelmed look about him. He clearly had not put "couple fucking in an alley" on his list of problems to solve on evening duty.

The footsteps moved on. Back toward the car, back toward the entrance, and then the light changed — the blue strobe cutting off, the engine note shifting, the car pulling back out into the street with the total indifference of an institution that had other problems.

Neither of them moved for a moment.

V was still against the wall. Her stranger was still holding her up. His heartbeat was still thudding against her chest, and she became aware, in a very specific and inconvenient way, of the fact that her leg was still hooked over his hip, her hands were still in his jacket and all of this had served its operational purpose approximately fifteen seconds ago.

She unwound herself, dropping back to the ground, her ankle sending up an immediate and pointed objection at once. She took a step to the side and put some air between them and looked at him.

He looked at her.

His expression was — she couldn't read it exactly. Something in the vicinity of reassessing. His chest was still moving too fast from the running and the split above his eye had started bleeding again with renewed enthusiasm. He raised the back of his wrist to it in an absent way, like the bleeding was a minor inconvenience.

A beat.

"Your—" he gestured vaguely at the general area of his own mouth.

V touched her lip. Split, on the inside, from before. Her cheekbone was still pulsing where Gerry had connected. She probably looked exactly as bad as he did, which was somehow both comforting and annoying.

Gerry. Right.

He was still on the ground, still fortunately breathing, the dark wet patch under his head having achieved a stable perimeter. Not getting worse. He seemed mostly fine but V was going to have to make a call about what happened next, and she was going to have to make it in the next thirty seconds before the NCPD circled back or someone else wandered into this alley and found an unconscious man and two people with split faces standing over him like a very poor excuse for a crime scene.

"He alive?" The man had moved up beside her without her tracking it, looking down at Gerry with disgust.

"Yeah." She crouched, checked the pulse again on reflex. Still there. "Knocked his head. He'll wake up with something to add to the conspiracy."

"The what?"

"Long story," V sighed.

She was already moving, already running her hands over the windbreaker with impersonality. She’d done this enough times to stop feeling weird about it. Pockets first. Outside pockets, both of them, and the left one gave her something immediately — a shard, standard issue, the type you could buy at any tech kiosk in the city, nothing remarkable about the casing. She pocketed it. Moved to the right pocket. Another one, this one cracked along one edge, a hairline fracture that made it look like it had survived something it probably shouldn't have. She pocketed that too.

She unzipped the windbreaker.

"Hey—" the man started.

"He hit me first," V muttered, which felt important to note and also not the point, but she said it anyway because she needed him to stop talking and let her work. She found the inner breast pocket. A third shard, this one in a sleeve. She turned it over in her fingers once and put it with the others.

Three shards. One of which was probably Flacco's. Two of which were probably Gerry's personal archive of proof that the water recyclers were doing something nefarious. She'd sort it out later. She'd sort it out somewhere that wasn't this alley with this man watching her rifle through an unconscious conspiracy theorist's jacket.

Fan-fucking-tastic.

She looked up. The face was still doing the thing where she almost knew it, where her memory kept reaching and coming back empty. It was starting to piss her off.

"Well," she muttered, standing up. "That was nice."

It came out almost conversational, which was not what she'd intended. The alternative was acknowledging that the last three minutes had happened in a way that would require her to have some kind of feeling about them.

The man looked at her.

She looked at him.

The alley was quiet except for Gerry's breathing and the distant city noise. Neither of them moved. There was an atmosphere to the silence that V recognized from situations where the scene had concluded and what was left was just two people standing in the wreckage of a thing that had been, technically, a performance, and trying to figure out what the next move was.

It was, she had to admit, extremely awkward.

It didn't help that he was looking at her in a way that didn’t require any particular analysis — the slow and completely unsubtle stare that started somewhere around her face and took its time getting anywhere else with absolute confidence, as if he’d decided the social contract around that particular behavior didn't apply to him. He wasn't even trying to be subtle about it. He had that vibe about him, she was noticing now, of a man who had decided a long time ago that a certain amount of brazenness was just the natural state of affairs. Sleazy wasn't quite the word. Sleazy implied he was bad at it.

He wasn't bad at it.

There was something in it that should have been offensive. V was ninety percent sure it was offensive. She was in the process of being offended by it.

He was better-looking than she'd registered against the wall, which was saying something given that she'd been pressed against the wall with her leg over his hip and had clocked his face from approximately two inches away. Lean through the shoulders in a way that the jacket underplayed. He had a jawline that was doing something deeply unfair in the bad light. The split above his eye had slowed to a seep and the blood had tracked down his cheekbone in a cinematic way that should not have worked for him as much as it did. None of it mattered. He looked like someone had designed him to be inconvenient.

Fuck it.

V looked back. Did the same circuit he'd done, made no effort to be subtle about it, because he certainly hadn't been and V was nothing if not symmetrical about these things. He noticed it — she saw him notice it, the slight shift in how he was standing, something that wasn't quite a smile but was in the neighborhood.

The drawl, she thought distantly. The drawl was going to be a problem.

V returned her gaze to a neutral midpoint somewhere past his shoulder and told herself she felt nothing in particular.

"You always pick pockets after?" he grumbled.

"He owed someone something." She patted her jacket where the shards were. "I'm the collection."

"Hm."

That was it. Just the sound. She couldn't tell if it was judgment or something else and she wasn't going to ask.

Something crossed his face — a flicker that might have been amusement, might have been something else. The almost-smile resolved into an actual one, brief and slightly crooked, and V became aware that this had been a mistake on some fundamental level that she hadn't entirely mapped out yet.

He considered her. She let him consider her.

"Johnny," he said after a moment.

She blinked. He held out his hand.

"What?"

His hand was still out there — just hanging in the air between them, waiting, like he had all the time in the world and was genuinely unbothered by the unconscious man on the ground three feet away.

She took it.

"V," she said.

His grip was dry, firm, the knuckles rough under her fingers in a way that confirmed what she'd already noticed about the state of them. He didn't let go, just held it for a beat past the standard duration, which V filed away as more of the same brazenness she'd already catalogued and decided she wasn't going to reward with a reaction.

Then the thing happened.

It wasn't slow. That was the part she couldn't account for later: she'd have thought it would be slow, the way recognition usually arrived, a gradual assembling of evidence into conclusion. It happened all at once, the way a lock turned. Johnny. His face. The jaw, the build, the leather, the complete and total absence of any apparent concern about his own continued legal existence. The way he'd moved. The way he'd looked at her like the usual social rules didn't apply to him, because for him it genuinely didn't, because he had decided a very long time ago that it didn't and the world had, inexplicably, agreed.

The name.

Oh.

Johnny Silverhand.

V knew that face. She knew it from a hundred different places she hadn't been thinking about when she'd been ogling him — from the posters that appeared on the sides of buildings before someone scraped them off, from the grainy net footage Vincent had watched on his phone and tried to explain why it mattered, from the stack of print-outs Gerry had probably laminated and organized by date in whatever apartment he was currently operating out of.

Rockerboy. Anti-corpo agitator. The kind of man that people like Gerry cited with the fervent, slightly unhinged energy. A patron saint for their brand of civic grievance. The kind of man who showed up in Night City's orbit periodically and left some variety of wreckage behind him, and not always the metaphorical kind.

Oh, she thought, with exhaustion. Oh, of course.

The kind of man who was, she now understood, the reason for the lockdown. The reason for the police. The reason the residents of City Centre had to have a complicated evening.

The reason Misty had grabbed her wrist and said stellium in Aries.

V breathed out through her nose.

It came out slow and flat and very, very tired, because that was what it was — tiredness, the bone-deep variety that arrived when the universe confirmed it had been, in fact, doing this on purpose. It wasn’t fear or even excitement.

She watched his face change.

Johnny was still holding her hand. He hadn't let go, hadn't done anything so straightforward as release her from the handshake, just held on with that same tenacity he'd had about him from the moment he'd walked into the alley. Something in the way she'd exhaled had apparently communicated something to him, because the expression he'd been wearing shifted. The almost-smile that had been in the neighborhood of crooked and self-aware moved somewhere else. 

Predatory was the word. V didn't want to use it but it was accurate.

The smile spread as if he'd decided on something just then, like the sigh had been a door opening rather than one closing.

Johnny Silverhand was standing in front of her in a leather jacket with blood drying on his face, holding her hand, and smiling at her like that.

What the actual fuck.