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Home, hold on, if love is the answer you’re home, hold on, if love is the answer you’re home, hold on, if love is the answer you’re home, hold on, if love is the answer you’re home, hold on, if love is the answer you’re home, hold on, if love is the answer you’re—
Johnny has always been very familiar with intimacy. He’s never been shy about it, in fact quite the opposite. Much to V’s denies, she’s had to hear about the many escapades he’s partaken in, even sometimes throwing out memories into the forefront for her to see, laughing as she curses him a storm.
Yet, despite this, there has been no greater level of intimacy he’s experienced than being in someone’s head.
He isn’t sure if he’ll ever get used to it, the feeling of literally wearing someone else’s skin and having zero control of it. It gets even harder to ignore when there is zero privacy in thought, even less so when she’s asleep.
V’s tense, he can feel this, even as she’s simply trying to gather some shut eye – there’s a strain within her that she’s not letting past her mental walls.
Johnny’s tense, but he knows exactly why he’s feeling this way. He’s trapped in someone else’s head, someone else’s body, and he can’t even fall back to his vices to edge his nerves. For fuck’s sake, V hates tequila, hates smoking, and she’s almost purposefully avoiding any sort of bodily pleasure when by now Johnny would have had several different outputs at the end of his cock.
Jesus, how is she managing?
It’s not like he told her to not get herself off – hell if anything he teases her for being a prude, and that he doesn’t care if she wants to hook up with someone, so long as she isn’t making him fuck a cop or something.
He takes a drag of his cigarette, knowing that there’s nothing there, knowing that he’s not there, other than a series of pixels fuelled into reality by someone else’s heartbeat. He’ll ask her again to take one smoke in the morning, but he already knows that she’s going to tell him to fuck off and quit asking.
Blood.
Johnny stops, confused at the intrusion, and waits, in case it was just a once-off instance that he probably didn’t realise he created. He’s about to return his attention to his cigarette when he finally sees more.
Kicking fabric car seats. A ripped suit. Screaming until the throat is raw. Eyes devoid of life. Blood against a shaking palm.
It’s V.
He’s seen enough of this memory to be able to walk through it in his own sleep a dozen times. It’s not like he’s at liberty to offer grief counselling when he knows damn well he’s not qualified for that discussion, but he does know when too much is too much, and V’s starting to relive far too much. It’s enough that she had to endure that car ride with a corpse as long as she had, it’s another to relive it.
Johnny makes his way to her bed, careful in his approach. He knows some nights he can be straightforward, and other nights straightforward will earn a swift punch to the face. It’s looking like this is one of those nights.
“V,” he calls, quietly, calmly. He can feel his chest tighten, lungs unable to keep air he doesn’t even have to breathe. He loudly taps the top of the nightstand with an open palm, knowing if he touches her while she’s growing this anxious he’s definitely going to get hit. “V, it’s a nightmare.”
What’s terrifying to Johnny about all of this is how terrified he’s feeling from her, yet her sleeping body lies perfectly still, perfectly resting. Apart from now slightly audible breathing, nobody would be able to tell her sleep paralysis is keeping her locked in agony.
V’s cursed with something not even Johnny can manage – when nightmares hit, they hit, and they do everything in their power to keep her asleep until her body can naturally escape her circadian rhythm. She often wakes up having to be manhandled, which only adds to the confusion and terror.
“Fuck,” he murmurs, taking off his aviators and setting them down next to her omega blockers before finally readying himself to be hit. He then reaches over and lightly shoves her shoulder. Once. Twice. Three times. “V.”
When he leans closer and shakes harder, that finally snaps her eyes open, and true to memory, she’s swinging. The gnawing pain at his jaw doesn’t register as he’s bracing himself on the floor, hearing her in the bed above him gasping for air, scurrying into the corner and shoving the blankets off from continuing to suffocate her. He groans before he turns himself over, bracing himself on his elbows to look at her as she swallows in her surroundings.
She blinks, hard, before finally looking over at Johnny between heavy breaths.
“Fuck,” she sighs as she scoots towards the edge of the bed, her hands still holding onto the rim of the mattress as if she’d fall off the earth upon letting go. “Shit, Johnny, I’m sorry.”
“And you say I need therapy,” Johnny murmurs as he sits himself up entirely. He’s learned not to move too fast after these particular nights, not that she’d have a panic attack, but he does feel her heartrate spike if things are quicker than she can keep up. He still sees the twang of guilt in her eyes before he waves it off.
“Did you see anything?” V asks.
“I saw enough,” he says flatly.
She stands from the bed, floating her way to the fridge like a ghost. She rummages in to find one of her shot bottles of vodka and downs it in one swig, tossing the small bottle when she’s done. He can feel heat rushing down his throat and warming his chest as she does, but he doesn’t say anything when he pushes himself to a stand.
—probably never got them.
He doesn’t need context to know the rest of her thought was and what she was meaning; and it’s then he pulls his seat in front of him and looks directly at her when he starts talking.
“I do, actually.”
V loosely crosses her arms and rests her back against the wall. She doesn’t say anything, but he feels her frustration for failing to keep her mental shields up long enough.
“You know how many nights I saw Alt?” He asks calmly. “Especially after I learned a bit about netrunning, and how I ultimately was the reason for her death?”
V lowers her gaze, unsure of what to tell him, what to say – her own experience with netrunning made the reality clear to her the moment she saw that memory.
“This is what happens to people like us, V.” His words sting, a bitterness that she can tell he still has a difficult time processing on his own. “People will die, and their blood will stain our hands for the rest of our miserable fucking lives.”
She doesn’t respond to him, instead just quietly pulls another shot bottle from the fridge, kicks it back, and then returns to her bed. The sweat from her body had lightly dampened the sheets, which has since cooled exposed to the open air. It still isn’t the most comfortable for either of them.
He knows she isn’t planning to sleep anytime soon, no matter how hard she tries it, even as she tries and fails to ignore him pulling the chair up by the nightstand and returning to the seat. He can feel a question bubbling in his chest, but he isn’t sure what it is until she finally lets it into the air, one that he was definitely not prepared for.
“Do you have nightmares of Mikoshi?”
Johnny blinks, unsure of how to even approach it. Nightmares isn’t necessarily the best term for what he experiences in Mikoshi, every time he closes his eyes – hell is closer to the actual adjective to convey.
V just nods once with a hum, understanding his thought.
Johnny’s not really actually thought through Mikoshi long enough to let the actual nightmare part fester in. He tries not to, he tries so desperately not to think about how he’s here, but he doesn’t exist. The very concept of being real and unreal, existing but not within humanity – that shit is a fucking nightmare.
It’s almost impossible to even try to explain it to V, even if she can read his thoughts. Even if she can sympathise, she won’t even begin to understand.
“No, I don’t,” she tells him quietly, decibel of her voice just wavering above a whisper.
“What brought that up, by the way?”
V isn’t laying down anymore, giving up on trying to return to sleep so quickly. That’s a new record—fuck off.
“Oddly enough, hitting you,” she admits. “I know we share sensations, but I don’t know how I’m even able to touch you, or how you even can manage to touch me when—”
She pauses, then vaguely gestures at the two of them. “Y’know?”
“Yeah, I know,” Johnny huffs, pulling a smoke for himself. He’d offer one to her, but he knows she doesn’t smoke, and he knows that it wouldn’t even exist. “It’s like something from a shit Y2K film.”
There’s a beat in the air where all that’s audible is the flick of a lighter, the small inhale, and a cloud of smoke from the exhale. V waits until there’s a steady wisp of smoke coming from the ashes before she moves on to her next question.
“I can feel you when you touch me. There’s another body there, and it moves me when it wakes me up,” she looks at him from the cigarette. “When I touch you, do you feel it, too?”
“You throw a heavy fucking punch, V,” Johnny responds, his fingers absentmindedly rubbing the stinging against his jaw. “We need to find a better way to wake you up so I don’t have to realign my damn teeth.”
A small smirk tugs at the corner of her lips, and he feels a fraction of weight lifted off his chest in seeing that.
By the time Johnny finishes his cigarette and pushes it out in his ashtray, he’s noticed that V’s returned to laying back down, but still maintaining eye contact on him. She doesn’t look like she plans to sleep, but didn’t want to stay up.
“Did you want me to leave you alone so you can try to sleep?” Johnny asks her.
She shakes her head. “I don’t,” she pauses, trying to formulate the right words without sounding desperate, for lack of a better term. She wants to be upfront and tell him that she doesn’t want to be alone at the moment, but she’s trying to think of a way to say it that doesn’t come across as childish.
“That’s not childish,” Johnny says simply as he readjusts his seat to be closer to her. He grins. “I know I’m too irresistible to let leave your side.”
V groans, yet there’s a hint of a chuckle in the annoyance, and she rolls onto her back, looking up at the ceiling. When she was a teenager, she had posters up there of her various crushes and dreams, and now as an adult she isn’t sure what she’d put up there.
“I’d make a very pretty poster up there,” he nudges her with a smirk. “You can use it to all your satisfaction each morning.”
V doesn’t even look when her arm flails to him and lightly smacks his chest, causing him to let out a quiet laugh. He doesn’t let her arm remain untouched, though, as she brings it back to the bed his hand remains gently across her wrist and palm. She doesn’t swat it away, even when he does small strokes across her palmaris tendon with his thumb.
“Why don’t you do anything about that, by the way?” Johnny asks quietly, his voice softer than the pillows she’s laying against. “It’ll help let off some steam.”
V shrugs, not looking at him when she does. “Probably because I don’t want you watching like a perv.”
He lets out a theatrical sigh, his other hand pressed against his forehead. “Foiled my plans,” he groans, then looks back to her. “But if that’s really the thing you’re worried about, I won’t watch. I can’t promise I won’t feel it, though, or know it’s happening.”
V’s quiet for a while, and it’s in this while where Johnny, despite actual attempts being made to listen, cannot figure out what she’s thinking. For a moment, he’s starting to wonder if he was being a little too much at the moment, or if the soft motions on her arm are starting to comfort her into a sense of sleep, or if she’s just not thinking at all.
It’s definitely not the latter, he knows her by now to know this.
“It has been a while,” she sighs finally, quiet enough to where he almost didn’t hear her. Now he really wants to know what she’s thinking.
She lulls her head towards Johnny, her other hand reaching over to rest on top of the one caressing her arm. It clicks for him when he sees her eyes, and his mouth goes dry from saliva he doesn’t even create.
“V, I can’t do that to you,” he says finally, as much as it breaks his heart to say that. Upon seeing the faint sadness in her eyes, he continues to speak immediately, because seeing that seems to break his heart even worse. “At least not now, not like this.”
Johnny would be lying if he said he hadn’t thought how he’d take her to bed multiple times, conjuring a picture of the perfect moment where everything would work just right—
“We don’t have to,” V responds, a hint of melancholy in her tone that she suppresses so well the average person wouldn’t even detect it. But Johnny isn’t the average person. “But now you do have me curious on what you were meaning.”
He can almost feel his hands growing clammy with sweat he doesn’t secrete, now that that secret is out. But if anything, he’s starting to wonder how long it would be before she noticed he was even hiding it – if anything he’s made it clear to her several times just how attractive he finds her.
“I plan to take my sweet ass time with you, V,” Johnny’s voice is smooth, velvety rich with a voice that could almost be seen as an act, if she wasn’t able to feel that it’s genuine. “And I definitely don’t plan to do it all in one night, nor without a physical body to have you feel me in every kind of way.”
She shudders, a sound he will definitely tuck away for future use. “We don’t need to go all the way tonight,” she allures.
Just enough so neither of us go mad.
“Was you asking about if I can feel your touch your version of foreplay?” Johnny smirks. “That’s really shitty foreplay.”
V shifts towards the centre of the bed, inviting him to fill in space. “Show me how it’s done, then, rockerboy.”
God, fuck.
His lips brush against hers, tender and careful in movement, and his body hovers over hers as he crawls his way onto the bed, pinning her wrist beside her head. What was once tender skin to skin contact is starting to ignite into electricity and flame. They can feel this, and when this is affirmed at the sound of V’s breath hitching in her throat, that’s when he doesn’t hesitate then to grip her jaw with his metal arm and devour her.
This isn’t how he imagined their first kiss to be, and now he’s mighty curious on if – and how – she’s imagined them together, on how this tension was destined to fall.
V’s impatient, and that’s something he never debated about her in his imagination. He always thought that she’d prefer the slow burn, the long and tantalising wait for release to make it all the more satisfying when it comes. Yet, here she is, her free hand desperately trying to unbuckle his belt, swearing against his lips each time she fails.
It’s just as addicting as his smouldering V.
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus—
“Tell me what you want,” his breath is hot against her skin, forehead resting against hers while she struggles to formulate a response.
“Christ, Johnny, just—” she can’t even finish when he brings his knee between her legs, making her gasp in a way that makes him want to crumble apart. Yet, it’s when she grinds once against him, it’s her turn to elicit a shuddering response from him.
Maybe sweet ass time can wait, just for now, when this fire is already lighting and bringing warmth to his chest. He’s made a new mission for himself to have V make those sounds again every single chance he can get.
Johnny sits up onto his knees and goes for his buckle, having to use a hand to keep V back from consuming him whole. “Take yours off for me, babydoll,” he commands breathlessly, and her hands begin stripping her clothes off in such a breakneck speed it’s almost comical.
He’s seen her naked many times – almost inevitable at this point, but within this timeframe, and within this context, he can feel his mouth watering at the sight of her.
He doesn’t crawl back over her, instead starting between her legs, leaving kisses up her leg, bites on her inner thigh, hickeys across her stomach and chest, before tucking his finger under her chin and capturing her lips again.
V’s electrifying, and, in an odd sense, everything he does to her, drawing those delicious moans from her mouth, he can feel against his own body, faint ghost touches echoing his manoeuvres and only adding to the intensity.
“You have no idea how long I’ve dreamt of this,” Johnny pins her alternate wrist with his metal hand, the skin to skin contact now trailing across her whole body. “Dreamt of you. All the ways I’ve wanted to make you come undone. God, you make me fucking nervous.”
V lets out a breathy chuckle, speaking between hickeys across his neck and kisses on his jaw and collarbone. “You don’t seem nervous. You seem to know exactly what you’re doing.”
“V,” he whispers, her name like a caress. “I’m shaking.”
She pauses for a moment, now noticing the slight tremble in his arm that’s holding her wrist down, feeling his heart racing against a chest flush to hers, like the stage fright he’d likely have minutes before a gig.
She doesn’t know how to make him not nervous, especially since they both know that they both want this, that they both love it, that even if it doesn’t work out they would both be fine with each other in the end.
Instead, to calm his nerves, V slides her hand down his chest and ghosts her fingers across hard, sensitive skin, and he keens.
Any nerves he may have presented previously, even ones he may still be harbouring, are smothered beneath them as he hungrily takes her lips with his own, fingers now trailing down, sliding against the peaked nipples of her breasts, resting between her legs.
Her hand strokes him in a steady rhythm as he pants against her neck, working his lips onto her skin enough for a beautiful shade of purple to blossom underneath. Johnny teases her with his fingers, hovering just carefully, only “accidentally” brushing against her clit to where her rhythm falters and her volume control cascades.
“Johnny,” she moans. “If you don’t do something right fucking now I will stop and finish my damn self.”
He chuckles darkly, not immediately giving in to V’s demands as he kisses her again, swallowing a whimper from her lips when he purposefully strokes once against her clit. “Suit yourself, princess,” he breathes against her skin, yet the shake in his voice presents the growing cracks in his façade.
With that he presses two fingers into her, and they both moan at the sensation.
“Christ, V, do you always get this fucking wet?” Johnny breathes deeply, moving his fingers at a torturous pace in comparison to V’s strokes. Still trying to take some time, it seems, and she’s still impatient after all.
Johnny slowly works his way into matching her pace, feeling a tightness in his abdomen that he’s desperately trying to control. He wants to draw this out, draw her out, but V’s seemed to have picked up on habits of his when he was alone – either a shared muscle memory or prodding through actual memories, at this point he doesn’t care.
He kisses down her neck and bites her nipple as his fingers seem to have found that perfect little spot that turns her whimpers into cries, and it’s not too long after working her open when those cries turn into begs.
Johnny doesn’t even know what she’s begging for, between breathy kisses and heavy bites and a quickening rhythm her words become a string of Johnny, Johnny, please—please—
“God, that’s it,” he growls. “That’s it, V, keep saying my name and see what you’ll get.”
“Johnny—”
“—That’s a good girl, V, fucking come for me, don’t keep me waiting—V, come for me.”
The sound of her name is her undoing. Johnny doesn’t even finish his command as she tightens around his fingers and her body starts to shake. He rides her through it, continuing the pace until her moans collapse into desperate, breathy gasps against his cheek.
“Good fuckin’ girl,” he groans, tracing his thumb over her clit for an extra jolt of overstimulating pleasure coursing through her body. Her nerves—his nerves—are beyond electrified by now, and her noises retreat into whimpers and trembles.
V almost lets go, if not for the fact that he finally pulls his fingers out of her and wraps his hand around hers, guiding them both to his own satisfaction.
Johnny breathes heavy against her skin as she scoots a little more to the side to allow him to lie down next to her, which he does so gratefully. He keeps a hand on her body somewhere, wanting to keep the skin-to-skin contact as prolonged as he can. He breathes in the silence they both radiate, the only echo in the bedroom now being from their panting and the hum of the ceiling fan in the room next over.
He doesn’t keep track of time, and it’s in this moment where her walls are kept down where he can feel that she isn’t keeping track either. Neither of them know how long it is before Johnny finally decides to break the silence, the question starting to eat away at him more than the comfort of intimacy.
“Was that okay?” He asks quietly. “Are we okay?”
V turns to her side, looking him in the eyes now, eyelids hooded in adoration, and his heart flips in relief before she can even respond. She doesn’t need to.
I love you, he wants to say, but he doesn’t. He can feel it from her, too.
Johnny watches her, his hands resting within hers, as her eyes finally start to close after some time. He doesn’t say anything to her, nor does he move, almost afraid that if he does it would discourage her from rest, so he just lays there with her while the ripple of time courses through her mind, visions now soft and sweet.
It was beautiful in a way he had never previously desired, this level of intimacy. In these effortlessly fleeting moments between life and death, in the chaos of reprieve, he truly believes, even for a moment, that all of it was real.
Johnny almost doesn’t sleep, doesn’t need to, his body of all bodies requires minimum effort to maintain, yet the mind is what needed a soul, what needed healing. But for V—for Johnny—all of what came before and all of what comes next no longer seems so terrifying and bleak.
He holds onto her, the radiance in his chest lulling him to sleep, thoughts and whispers telling him to love in the morning, just as he had in the evening. For Johnny, V now is the answer to every question he’s ever made.
He’s home.