Chapter Text
Johnny stares at V across the digital space between them. V’s face betrays what Johnny fears: V has made up his mind, and there will be no convincing him to change it.
“I’m just scared for you, V,” he breathes, bearing his heart on that ghostly bridge in the depths of Mikoshi. Scared that cyberspace will destroy him, make him something other than the loyal, confident, crazy merc Johnny has grown to know so well. Scared of going on without him.
V clasps his hand then, eyes solemn. Their touch still doesn’t feel like much other than static, but it’s the first time they’re on even ground. They’re made of the same stuff in this digital prison. The horrible longing for the ability to touch him for real, just once, fills Johnny. He knows V already voiced the thought aloud, but it sticks in his skull: why couldn’t they both have a happier ending? Johnny knows that’s beyond Night City’s ability to grant them, but it sits bitterly in his chest now that he’s faced with the prospect of V leaving him instead of the other way around. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
V tries to pull away, and Johnny holds him fast. He stares into V’s eyes, hoping V can sense some of what Johnny is thinking: you are the only person who's really known me, I don’t know what I’m going to do without you, don’t do this to me.
V holds his gaze, and Johnny sees understanding there. V knows this will hurt him, but he’s made his decision.
He lets V go eventually, and he watches his retreating back as he makes his way down the bridge that leads deeper into cyberspace. V glances back one last time, and he gives Johnny a small smile before he turns back to the light.
Johnny stands there, his heart beating an awful pattern in his chest as the light slowly engulfs V. Soon the light is unbearable, and it overwhelms Johnny. Awareness fades.
The first thing Johnny feels is a throbbing pain coursing through his entire body. He coughs and rids liquid from his throat. He opens his eyes.
“V!” Panam surges to the edge of the pool and grabs his upper arms. She hauls him out onto the platform before Johnny can do more than blink confusedly at her. “V, Jesus, are you alright?”
Johnny recoils from her. He looks at his hands: V’s hands, with their black nail polish and that scar on his right palm that he got vaulting over a chain link fence when he was young.
“Fuck!” He tips forward onto his hands and knees, and his breathing goes tight and labored. He squeezes his eyes shut. His mind is an empty chasm. V is gone.
“V, what the fuck is going on? We need to get out of here!”
Johnny finally looks up at her, coolant dripping down his face. Her brows are furrowed, and she’s looking at V with the most heartfelt concern Johnny’s seen. He doesn’t deserve it. It’s not for him.
“Not V,” he says, low and grating. It sounds wrong in V’s voice.
She stares at him. “What?”
“V is gone.” His throat threatens to close around his words. “He left.”
Panam’s expression folds into one of angered shock, and she points her gun at him. “What did you do to him?”
Johnny doesn’t have the heart to argue with her. He scrubs his hand down his face—he wants more than anything to sit here and let Arasaka deal with him, let Panam deal with him, but V gave Johnny his body because Johnny has the opportunity to live on without him. The fucker gave him no choice but to save himself.
Panam is quiet long enough that Johnny looks back up at her. Her expression is more subdued and the gun has dipped to point at the ground. She’s staring at him, and Johnny can practically see the gears turning in her head. “You don’t even want to be here. V did something stupid, didn’t he?”
Johnny barks out a painful laugh. “Sure did.”
“Fuck.” Her voice breaks on the curse. Her next words are shaky with emotion. “I swear to god, that asshole, of course he would do something like this. I can’t believe it. Fucking martyr complex.” She covers her face with her hand and takes a deep breath. Johnny can see her control wavering, just like his own. An alarm sounds somewhere in the distance. “Shit! We need to get the hell out of here.” She points her gun at him again. “You swear to me that if we leave this fucking place, I won’t find out later that you’re keeping something from me and you’re the reason V’s not here right now.”
Johnny stares across the room at the huge server that links to Mikoshi, whirring away in that awful room. “V made his choice.”
“Come on.” Her voice has gone flat and low, and when Johnny looks at her, he sees her face is carefully clear of emotion.
Their escape from Arasaka Tower is harrowing, but Johnny is barely aware of any of it. He doesn’t think Panam will remember much, either.
The Aldecaldos are waiting for them outside the tunnel, and Panam and Johnny climb into Carol’s idling car.
Carol asks Panam something, but Johnny can’t hear it. His ears have filled with static, and he’s lightheaded. He feels hollowed out. In the very beginning, this was what he wanted. He was a prisoner in V’s body, and he would have given anything to have full control. Now, as he stares at V’s reflection in the car window, his stomach turns and he has to look away.
The camp is a flurry of motion when they return. They’re packing up to leave. Johnny stands there on the outskirts of the chaos, numb and lost—he’s not welcome here, he knows that, but right now he has no mind to figure out what he’s supposed to be doing, and the only person who knows he’s an imposter is Panam.
Panam eventually finds him. Her expression is tight, and it looks like she’d rather be doing anything other than talking to him. “It’s Johnny, right?”
Johnny clears his throat. “Yeah.”
“I won’t pretend to understand what went on between you and V while you were in his head. He didn’t tell me much. What happened in there? In Mikoshi?”
Johnny doesn’t want to talk about it, but she deserves to know. V would want her to know.
“The Relic changed V’s body’s DNA. Changed it to match mine.” Johnny can see Panam react to the way his voice sounds—a tightening of her shoulders and a furrow between her brows. It’s one thing to know your friend is gone and someone stands in his place, it’s another entirely to hear the evidence.
“If V had returned to his body, he would've only survived for another six months if he didn’t find a cure. The body would have rejected him. I told him to take that chance, but he chose to give his body to me. Couldn’t convince him to change his mind, but he’s always been stubborn.”
Panam looks away from him, biting her lip. “Self-sacrificing asshole,” she breathes. “All that work we did for him, and this is how he repays us.”
Johnny feels her pain acutely.
She squeezes her eyes shut and sighs tightly. “I don’t know you, but I know V. There must be something about you if he sacrificed everything for you. I don’t want to hate you. V wouldn’t want me to hate you, but it would be so easy.”
Johnny bites the inside of his cheek hard enough to draw blood.
“I think it best we go our separate ways,” she says. “I can’t explain to everyone what happened, and I don’t think I could bear seeing his face every day.”
Johnny releases a breath. “I get it. I couldn’t bear staying, anyway.”
“I’m sorry.”
Johnny shakes his head. “Don’t be. V made a choice, and now I need to live with it. The only thing I can do is respect it.”
Panam gives him a long look. They share this loss, but there is no bridging the gap it’s put between them. Johnny thinks he would have been friends with her, had things been different.
“V left a car here. You can take it.”
“Thanks, Panam,” Johnny says.
“Do something with V’s sacrifice. Make it worth it.”
Johnny doesn’t know if he can.
Night City greets him with a spitting rain that sticks to his hair as he approaches V’s apartment building.
A text comes through V’s holo.
V, how did everything go? You okay?
It’s Viktor, and Johnny dismisses the notification as soon as he reads it. He pauses at the foot of the stairs and squeezes his eyes shut at the wave of grief that washes over him. The cement partition bites into the palm of his hand, and he forces his fingers to loosen.
V’s apartment is cold and quiet. Johnny sinks onto the couch and stares at the junk V left scattered on the coffee table. A handwritten note to call Judy, an open box of mints, a half-consumed bottle of the nasty fake fruit juice V loved. Johnny sinks his hands into his hair and curls over his knees. His ragged breathing fills the empty apartment. How could V do this to him? Leave him here alone in this godforsaken place with the constant reminder that V gave him something Johnny doesn’t deserve? If only Johnny had tried harder. He hadn’t expected V to sacrifice himself. Johnny was okay with leaving into cyberspace. He hadn’t realized the stakes.
Johnny curls up in V’s bed and spends the rest of the day staring at the light carving its way across the apartment floor.
Messages for V trickle steadily into his holo. Johnny dismisses each one. How was V talking to so many people constantly?
Johnny spends the next few days like that. Despondent, alone in this apartment full of reminders, feeling like someone hollowed his chest out and left him there with the remnants. Mornings are the worst. He wakes up and waits for V’s answering presence. When V doesn’t wake, loneliness seizes Johnny by the throat and Johnny has to wait out the surge of grief that chokes him.
On day four, he takes one of the batons V left behind and shatters the bathroom mirror. He can’t bear his reflection. When he bends over the sink, glass bites into the palms of his hands and he barely notices.
Two weeks after V left him, he realizes he can’t stay here. There are too many reminders of V littered around this place where V will never return.
He packs only what he can’t bear to leave behind—it fills one small backpack. He turns and gives the place one last look. His hand wraps around the bullet pendant that hangs on his neck. No matter what he does, he’s not really leaving V behind. V will be with him for the rest of his life.
The apartment he finds is not far from the Pistis Sophia. It’s a run-down place, but the rent is cheap and the neighbors mind their business. That’s all he needs. He ventures out into the city a little more, and it only serves to prove to him that he doesn’t belong here. He’s a man out of time and one half of a whole that will never be reunited. He’s back in his apartment before dark every night, alone between the cold four walls.
He hasn’t lived there long when he notices how often he passes the same teenage boy. He never sees the kid’s parents, and when he actually starts paying attention, he notices bruising on the kid’s face that can only mean one thing. It’s not uncommon around here, but it still makes him grind his teeth in anger.
When he sees the kid carrying a shitty secondhand axe, he decides he’s got a new project. It takes some time to get the kid to trust him, but when Johnny starts talking shop, the kid lights up, and Johnny finds himself with a new friend. Steve is bright and friendly, and he does a little to fill the hole in Johnny’s chest.
“Here, bend your finger more like this,” Johnny says, leaning forward and poking Steve’s ring finger. “You want to keep this part of your finger flat.” He demonstrates, and Steve squints at him before trying himself. “You’ll be able to press down on all the strings a lot more evenly.”
They’re sitting on the front steps of the apartment building, and Steve has his guitar in his lap. The late summer sun beats down on them, but it’s better than the stifling dark interior of the apartment complex.
“These bar chords are hard,” Steve says with a frustrated huff.
“That’s why you gotta practice,” Johnny replies. “Soon your hands will find the positions with no problem.”
Steve hums and tries to get the chord to ring true. It buzzes dully, and Steve grimaces. “If you say so.”
After they’ve practiced for an hour or so, Steve sets his guitar aside and sits back on the steps. Johnny can feel Steve looking at him, but he doesn’t meet his gaze. He knows Steve thinks he's strange, as much as he also looks up to him. There are a lot of things about Johnny now that don’t add up. The bullet pendant he keeps tucked under his shirt is warm against his skin.
Days pass like that. Kerry calls V, and Johnny can’t bring himself to answer. What would he tell him?
He calls Rogue instead. She doesn’t pick up and he spends a moment as her voicemail connects trying to get his words in order.
“Hey, Rogue. It’s… uh, it’s Johnny. I wanted you to know that I’m alive. V, uh—” He clears his throat and closes his eyes. “V left with Alt past the Blackwall. Sacrificed himself so I could live on. I don’t know how I’m ever going to live up to that. Don’t know if I ever will. You don’t need to do anything. Don’t need to look me up or anything. I just wanted you to know.”
The message she leaves him in return cuts like a knife buried in his stomach. Rogue will never believe that he’s changed, and maybe she’s right. Maybe he’s still the same, selfish rockerboy he was before this all started. Maybe he did manipulate V, and that's why he's here and V's not.
Two weeks after Mikoshi, V gets two phone calls. One from Misty and one from Viktor. Both are pleading with V to let them know he’s okay. Johnny doesn’t return their calls.
What else could V and Johnny have done? Was there some solution out there that would have ensured V’s life? He should have grilled Alt more thoroughly. He should have agreed to return to V’s body with him and found another solution. There had to have been a solution. Johnny sinks his head into his hands and lets the apartment grow dark around him.
It’s the least Johnny can do to let V’s closest friends know what happened, but he can’t bring himself to do it. He can’t tell them that V is gone forever and has left his unworthy soul in his place. He can’t do that to them and he can’t do that to himself. Panam’s horrified disgust when she first realized he wasn’t V sticks with him.
It’s four weeks after Mikoshi that Johnny can finally face his reflection. When he manages to look into his face—V’s face—he spends a long time staring. Gone is that friendly curl that would lift the corner of V’s mouth when he was talking to someone he liked. Johnny can’t replicate it. He’s a sad, pale reflection of the V Johnny knew. He has never managed to get V’s hair to do what it did when V took care of it. It flops over his forehead sadly. The worst thing about looking at his reflection now is that he looks much healthier than V did when Johnny knew him. His skin is pink again, and the dark bruising under his eyes is gone. He’s not dying.
It’s on one of Johnny’s quiet walks in the city that a thought strikes him.
He doesn’t have to stay here. He doesn’t have to let Night City keep taking from him. V gave him a new life, and the only thing left for him in this city is the reminder of his failure and his loss. Rogue wants nothing to do with him, and he won’t insert himself into Kerry’s life again.
He purchases a bus ticket that evening. The bus doesn’t leave for a few more weeks, which allows him time to get his affairs in order—the few affairs he has—and say goodbye to the city. He books the ticket one-way through the Pacific Confederation to Portland. He’s not sure if he’ll stay there and he has no plans once he arrives, but it’s the step in a new direction he needs. It gives him something to look forward to, and for the first time since Mikoshi, he doesn’t feel like he’s barely treading water in a black ocean. He turns on the record player he brought from V’s apartment and lets it give a little life to his home.
He never really stopped talking to V. In the beginning, it hurt when there was no response and he remembered he was alone, but it gets easier as time goes on. Talking to V is his way of making it feel like V is still there with him, pathetic as that may be.
Sometimes, Johnny catches snippets of V’s memories in his dreams. V is no longer here, but the brain he’s inside was once V’s. Some neural pathways still remain. It’s the hardest when the memories are ones Johnny hadn’t seen before. It’s a window into a past long gone.
He sees the blurry outline of a man V barely remembers: an older brother that died when V was too young to really know him. He feels the heat of the island sun on his face, feels it for the last time as the boat carries V and two people who must be his parents away from the coast and towards a new life. He sees the Bakkers. Sometimes, Johnny sees Jackie in his dreams.
On those nights, Johnny wakes with tears on his face and wonders if these memories will follow him forever, just like V’s face will always be with him.
Johnny doesn’t tell Steve he plans to leave, but he makes sure to impart as much advice as he can in the time they have left. He can’t take Steve’s deadbeat dad away from him or make the guy a good father, but he can give Steve the encouragement he would have appreciated as a kid in a similar situation. The last thing he does is buy the kid the best guitar he can get his hands on.
“That necklace is neat,” Steve says on their way to the cemetery.
Johnny rolls the bullet pendant between his fingers. “It’s a memento of a friend of mine,” Johnny says.
“Oh.” Steve seems to get his meaning. “He was important to you?”
“Very important.” The metal cuts into Johnny’s fingers, and he forces his hand to relax. “Craziest guy I knew, but also the best man I knew. It’s time I returned it to him.”
Steve falls silent.
The columbarium is a bubble of quiet that’s unusual for Night City. Johnny purchases a unit and places the pendant inside. He closes his eyes and stands over the open drawer for a moment.
He tells V how brave he was. He tells him that it’s time for Johnny to stop ruminating over what he could have done differently. “How could I forget you? I’m wearing your damn face.”
Leaving the pendant behind in that drawer feels like leaving a piece of V behind, and it hurts like an open wound, but Johnny knows it’s for the best. He needs to honor V’s sacrifice and do something other than stew in regrets. He needs to heal. He can’t do that unless he lets V leave him.
Steve waits for him outside the cemetery, and he looks up at Johnny with a solemn expression and asks if his friend died a while ago.
“Not that long ago.”
Johnny smiles sadly as Steve tells him about his late grandfather. It’s the easy but profound logic of a teenager, and it does make Johnny feel a little better.
The bus is waiting for Johnny, and when he gets on it, he feels a sort of peace come over him. This was the right decision.
He smiles at Steve through the window as the kid realizes the guitar is a gift for him, and then the bus picks up speed, and Night City begins to shrink behind them. Johnny rolls the window down and lets the breeze pull at his hair and clear the stench of the city from his nose. He vows to himself there that he won't forget any of the sacrifices that his friends made to get him to where he is now.
The bus makes a short stop in San Francisco. Johnny is standing to get off the bus when his holo rings. Rogue.
“I didn’t expect you to contact me again,” he says, voice rough.
She gives him a cold look through the holo. “I didn’t expect to either. I won’t disrupt your shiny new life for long, I just have some information for you that you might find interesting.”
“What?”
“A client wanted some information from an old Arasaka facility. There were some files that he needed unearthed from their old cryo program, something about a former customer that never woke from cryogenic sleep. My merc pulled a list of customers.”
Something foreboding prickles in Johnny’s chest.
“Your name was on that list.”
Johnny stumbles on his way down the bus steps and curses. The person behind him calls him a name and shoves past him, but Johnny is too distracted to be annoyed.
“What?” Johnny croaks. He steps off the bus and out of the way of the stairs.
“Turns out Arasaka didn’t bury your body in the oilfields. Don’t know what they were planning, but they froze it.”
Johnny gets a hand on the side of the bus and leans against it. The bus driver steps off the bus and asks him a question Johnny doesn’t hear and then walks away when Johnny ignores him.
“Is it still there?” Johnny asks.
“Don’t know. I can find out,” Rogue replies. “Wasn’t sure that was something you’d want, so I haven’t dug into it yet.”
Johnny squeezes his eyes shut. “Find out for me, please. I need to know.”
“Alright. I’ll call you back.”
The call ends, and Johnny lurches to the bench that sits on the roadside. Arasaka froze his fucking body like some sort of macabre trophy. Keeping his soul wasn’t enough for them.
Johnny lets the bus leave without him. He finds a cheap hotel on the outskirts of San Francisco and waits for Rogue’s call. If it turns out his body is frozen and viable, he doesn’t know what he’ll do. Will it matter? V gave up his life for Johnny. If Johnny somehow transfers his engram back to his body, then V’s body will die, and V’s sacrifice will have been for nothing. He stews in the dark of the hotel room, stomach tied in knots.
Rogue calls him twelve hours later.
“Arasaka has your body.”
Johnny cradles his head in his hands. “It was for nothing. It was for fucking nothing.”
“The guilt finally catching up with you?” Rogue asks icily.
“You have no fucking idea what you’re talking about,” Johnny hisses.
Rogue doesn’t respond to that. “If you want to be transferred back to your body, we can probably figure something out. I’ll have Nix make some calls.”
“I don’t know what I want. Might as well actually bury it in the fucking oil fields.”
“Your body has been in cryo for half a century. You don’t have to decide right now. Just let me know.”
Johnny presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Alright. I’ll call you.”
San Francisco is less overwhelming than Night City, but that doesn’t mean much. It’s still a dirty, crowded city, and Johnny wanders the streets at night to avoid the crowds. The hotel he chose is in a dangerous part of the city, and the hotel itself is filthy, but that’s the least of his worries. He oscillates between regret that he asked Rogue to find his body and the knowledge that he would have spent his whole life wondering if he hadn’t asked. What good will it do? V is gone. Johnny isn’t going to leave V’s body to rot. Even if it means living with the constant reminder of his failure, Johnny would rather live with that shame than pretend it never happened. He has half a mind to ask Rogue to pull the plug on his body.
He stares out across the dark waters of the San Francisco Bay, fingers tight on the handrail that borders the riverside walking path. There's a chill coming off the water, a reminder that the turn of the seasons is almost here. If he had just worked harder, he would have discovered this fact for himself and V wouldn’t have had to leave at all. What are the fucking odds this information surfaces now? He's the butt of some cosmic joke, and the trickster is up there somewhere laughing his ass off.
What would V tell him to do? He tries to imagine V’s face as he talks, the way he would roll his eyes at Johnny and give him an answer that literally no one else would consider because they’re not crazy. And then he’d prove Johnny wrong.
When Johnny first woke up in V’s head, he thought V to be another petty, worthless merc who cared only about making a ton of scratch and a name for himself. V cared about those things, sure, but Johnny had quickly learned the depth of V’s personality. Loyal, with a strong moral compass that you didn’t often see with a paid killer. V lacked Johnny's broader vision, but he cared about people. Cared about Johnny. He was fucking weird, but people had always said the same thing about Johnny, and it made the two of them click in a way Johnny had never expected.
Johnny misses him, misses him more than he knows how to handle.
An idea comes to Johnny then, and his heart starts beating faster. It’s been only two months since V left. Maybe there’s still a way to reach him. Maybe there’s still something left of him. The Voodoo Boys pushed V past the Blackwall to reach Alt. Maybe Johnny can push past the Blackwall the same way. Now that there are two bodies, there's no reason for either of them to be stuck in cyberspace.
He has to hurry.