Chapter Text
Johnny breaks into Kerry’s house in the middle of the night, and it’s way too easy. He realises pretty quickly that Kerry is not actually here, and it takes only a little bit of snooping around his house to learn that he’s not just touring but really fucking touring. His schedule says that he’s spent the last couple weeks on the goddamn moon, which makes Johnny want to break something. He does, smashes a bunch of the glass bottles left messily all over the house, shoots the security cameras that he’d been skirting around, then uses some of the more expensive looking bottles of booze on the shelves as target practice. He yanks a guitar off the wall — his fucking guitar, from 2023, god damn — and stomps his way back to the computer. He doesn’t care if it alerts someone; good. He’s here to be noticed.
Johnny is no netrunner, but the kid whose body he’s in was. He gets fleeting impulses and instincts about it, shit he would usually try to ignore. Tonight he follows an impulse and cracks Kerry’s terminal wide open with one of the kid’s daemons. He calls Kerry from his own computer.
“The fuck is this?” Kerry answers. Fucking hell, Kerry looks old. It’s the first thing Johnny can think, seeing his image pop up on the screen. His hair is about the same length as Johnny’s used to be, but it’s all grey, a real and natural grey, multiple shades filtering through. He’s got artfully messy smudged black eyeshadow, vest and no shirt, giant fucking piece of chrome in his throat. He looks old, but he doesn’t look ninety years old. He looks — fuck, he looks grown up. Johnny feels a pang of something, some kind of… definitely not regret, because he doesn’t have any of those. It kind of sucks that the kid he knew Kerry as is gone. That’s all.
“Damn, Ker, your opsec sucks ass,” Johnny drawls. He hits a single chord as Kerry frowns, lets it waver out teasingly with vibrato.
“Who the fuck is this,” Kerry says, flat and disbelieving, barely a question.
Johnny thinks about what the chick had said about Chippin’ In. To spite her, he plays Never Fade Away instead. It has the same effect: as he recognises Johnny, Kerry’s face goes from confused anger, to shocked anger to, well, angry anger.
“What the actual fuck, Johnny,” Kerry says, eyes on fire. For a moment Johnny thinks Kerry is going to hang up on him, that maybe he’s finally grown a spine after all these years. Then Kerry laughs and rubs a ring-covered hand all over his face. “Shit, choom, don’t fuckin’ believe it. Welcome back, a-fucking-gain. Coulda skipped the whole song-and-dance this time.” He sounds relieved. Surprised, but not shocked. Maybe slightly bitter, but it’s hard to get a read on him.
Johnny bristles against this reaction. He wanted some kind of anger, some kind of explosion. The verbal equivalent of Kerry socking him one. Well, maybe he’ll get that once Kerry figures out that the other guy wasn’t him.
Kerry continues, “Where’s V? She alright? Shit, she was so certain you were gone, was this her doing? If anyone could do the impossible, it’d be that kid.”
“Ugh, V, V, V, who gives a fuck about V?” Johnny says, fuming, not expecting her to come up already. Kerry’s face immediately closes off. “V has shitall to do with me.”
Kerry stares at him silently. Eventually, he says, “Alright. Who the fuck are you actually?” He’s using the light, casual tone he always takes when he’s trying to hide how fucked up he is.
“What the fuck, Ker,” Johnny says, disbelieving. “You gone goddamn senile? What do you want from me, all your deep fuckin’ secrets? Want me to remind you how I called you a pussy last we met? Want me to repeat the shit you said when your dad kicked it? Is it really so damn unbelievable that I don’t give a shit about some washed up merc kid who can barely hold a gun anymore?”
“Johnny,” Kerry says breathlessly, like he’s recognising him all over again. “Last we met you told me you were gonna die for that kid.” He’s back to frowning rather than that intense anger from before. “Shit, it’s like you…”
“Like I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about?” Johnny finishes for him “Yeah, dipshit, woke up three weeks ago in this twinky fuckin’ body, every fuckin’ person I ever knew dead or gone. Then I get accosted on the street by some bitch claiming she carried me around in her head for six months, but she won’t tell me a goddamn thing about what the fuck is happening.”
The look of realisation and horror on Kerry’s face is almost funny. “You really don’t remember her? But you’ve talked to her? And she didn’t fuckin’ tell me?”
“Whoever that was in her head, it wasn’t me,” Johnny says with more certainty than he feels.
Kerry laughs at him, and there’s cruelty in it. “I guaran-fuckin’-tee, Johnny, it was you in her head. I fuckin’ promise. On anything and everything I ever fuckin’ cared about, anything that ever meant anything to either of us.” Johnny really doesn’t like that. “What are you calling me for?”
Johnny feels like his head is going to fucking explode. “Is it so unbelievable that I wanted a fuckin’ friend to talk to?” is what comes out of his mouth, sounding much less angry than he’s actually feeling. Something about seeing Kerry alive and thriving, at fucking ninety years old, looking more like a rockstar than he ever did in his twenties, is really worming its way into Johnny’s heart. Even Kerry isn’t the same. Once upon a time Kerry would’ve been already on a flight back to Night City for Johnny at just hearing the holo ring.
“Guess not,” Kerry says. His expression softens. “Sorry, choom. Just a lot to take in. I gotta get on a flight to Paris soon, but let’s fuckin’ talk. Tell me what you’ve been doin’, I’ll tell you what I’ve been doin’, and about V,” Kerry says. “Go drink my fuckin’ booze or something. God knows we shouldn’t be sober for this.”
Johnny leaves Kerry’s ugly house hours later, pretty fucking drunk. He’s drunk enough that he probably shouldn’t drive, and for once in his life he actually doesn’t. He leaves the car he stole parked outside Kerry’s gates and gets on the transit instead. Dying once — or twice, apparently — makes him a bit more concerned about becoming a red smear on the asphalt. He has shit he still wants to do.
Right now, that shit is mostly to think, because Kerry had said a whole lot of unbelievable bullshit. Mostly he had talked about himself, because he was a self centered little shit. For all the uncomfortable parts, there had been a lot of really good parts too, a little oasis of familiarity here in 2080. Johnny had found himself more than once on the cusp of admitting that he had missed Kerry, which was a step too far, even back from the dead. Kerry had known frustratingly little about the whole V situation, which really was to be expected. Half the time the answer to a question had been eh, I don’t really remember. But he’d told Johnny about his collaboration with some Japanese lazrpop girl group of all things, about him and V doing a tiny touch of terrorism, for all the good it had done. He’d insisted that V was great — you’ll love her, Johnny, I swear — that it had been weird when she’d disappeared for two years and weirder when she came back, but that she was a good kid. Kerry had talked like they were genuine friends, beyond anything to do with Johnny, even though Kerry admitted to only talking to her maybe twice in the last year. Fuck, he’d even tried to threaten him to not fuck V over.
Johnny doesn’t get why he — the other him — didn’t just kill V immediately. He’d killed the kid in this head, whoever they were, before he’d even quite figured out that they were both in the one body. It had been reflexive. The kid had fought back but Johnny was stronger — or maybe it was the Relic slotted in their head that was stronger. Kerry had mentioned some magic pills, so maybe that had been it, that V had some medical edge that had saved her. But shit, six months. That’s a long time to be leashed. Johnny chafes against even the idea of it. That’s not even to mention dying for her. Not like Johnny hasn’t been fully willing to martyr himself before, but, Jesus. Maybe that version of him came back wrong, all scrambled and soft.
If he’s honest with himself, Johnny isn’t sure that this version of him isn’t scrambled too. The kid is dead but it’s still their brain, their body. He doesn’t know their name, but he knows their favourite colour. He knows they were some overenthusiastic netrunner with a chip the size of Texas on their shoulder. He knows that fried tofu over rice was their favourite meal. He eats it a lot, tells himself that he always liked it. It’s a small lie in the scheme of things.
Johnny remembers their stupid plan, their little netrunner shack hidden away in the rafters of ‘Saka Tower. He remembers it like it’s his own memory, months and months of stealthy rewiring and late nights coding daemons, of climbing through scaffolds draped with wires, deftly sidestepping guards and cameras. He remembers doing nothing but siphoning Arasaka secrets for an entire week and locking them away in a fully isolated data fortress. Kid had been a genuine fucking genius when it came to netrunning. He remembers the feeling of data streaming beneath his fingertips. He remembers the thrill of the challenge, the complete confidence in his own skills, the knowledge that this shit was going to set him for life, enough corporate secrets to pay for both a ticket out of NC and the level of security he was going to need to survive selling it. He remembers seeing the prototype Relic file, realising that it was even bigger than he had imagined. He remembers making the decision to get in there, the fake IDs, the bluffing, the months of careful planning. He remembers the way his heart leapt in his throat when the elevators dinged, the cold sweat as he thought about digital immortality and stepped forwards. Things get hazy after that.
It’s as Johnny gets back to Kabuki and stumbles up the stairs to his apartment that he realises he needs to see V again. There was a lot Kerry didn’t know but there was some shit he had been holding back as well. Some things he had been blatant about — fuckin’ ask V — but others he had just been evasive and sly, as though Kerry has ever been able to lie to him. Johnny needs to talk to her and find out what other-him had said and done. He needs to know what the hell he’d seen in her, why he’d told Kerry that he was going to die for her. V had said something about overwriting and morals, but that sounds like bullshit to him. That sounds like something that gets you through a few weeks, not six months. Whatever the hell has made him stick around that long, whatever killed him — he needs to know.