Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

V didn’t remember walking out of Arasaka Tower. Or crashing through whatever hell they’d called a mission. Truth was, her memory of that week was a big black void. One second, she was moving, fighting, thinking—maybe screaming—and the next, nothing. Just fragments of pain, gnawing and blunt, the kind that didn’t care about timing or logic. Bits of herself showed up in flashes: her body aching in places she didn’t even know could hurt, her head pounding with a rhythm that didn’t match any music she’d ever heard, and the occasional echo of someone screaming her name. That someone, apparently, wasn’t in the room.

She learned later that she’d been badly hurt. Vik’s voice was the first thing that registered when she finally opened her eyes properly, blinking like she was trying to reset the whole world. The old ripper didn’t sugarcoat anything. She’d asked about Johnny, because the urge to know where he was didn’t exactly die when she lost consciousness. And Vik… he just shook his head. No Johnny. Not anywhere.

She was alone. Finally, painfully, achingly alone in her own head.

She tried to orient herself, squinting at the walls of the clinic like it would offer answers. The fluorescent light hummed with the same mechanical indifference it had always carried, and the air smelled of antiseptic and cold metal. Not that it mattered. Her head hurt too much to care about smells or sounds. Her arms felt foreign, bruised in places she couldn’t name without wincing. She touched her face once and almost recoiled. God, the whole thing hurt.

The drugs made it worse and better at the same time. She felt untethered from herself, floating, distant, like she was watching someone else flinch under the weight of their own skin. She remembered how it felt to try and move, to breathe through the pain and the memory blanks, and how the world kept insisting she keep going even when she had nothing left to give.

Johnny wasn’t there, and she felt it like an ache she couldn’t name. Not the sharp, angry, chaotic sort of ache he usually brought, but something quieter, more insidious. He wasn’t in the room, and that meant her hallucinations couldn’t fill the space, couldn’t offer the familiar bite of his sarcasm or the heat of his hands. For the first time in months she had to sit with the fact that she was completely, terrifyingly alone.

She tried to move, to check herself, to find some anchor in the world she could still recognize. The ache didn’t leave, and the drugs blurred it like a water stain on glass, smudging the edges until nothing felt real. Then there was the lingering terror of her own mind—of what she didn’t remember, what she might have done, who she might have hurt or failed.

V exhaled a slow, trembling breath. It was supposed to be sarcasm, some dark little quip about waking up like a corpse and still managing to look mildly unimpressed. It came out as a weak rasp. She was alone. She was alive. And she had absolutely no memory of how the hell she’d gotten there.

To call it a breakdown would’ve been a gross understatement. A breakdown sounded tidy, somehow contained—like it came with a predictable timetable and maybe a chance at recovery. What she felt when she finally came off the drugs Vik had pumped her full of for the first week wasn’t tidy at all. Heartache, misery, resignation—that was the cocktail. A thick, unshakable sludge that filled every inch of her chest and refused to be distracted by even the smallest thing.

At first, she decided the quiet was Johnny being simply theatrical. Of course he’d make an exit, let the tension stretch, then crash back in with a line and a cigarette like he was the one doing her a favor. He’d always been a showman. Why should a little thing like metaphysics change that?

She measured the room for signs anyway—out of habit, out of superstition. The blue flicker on the edge of her vision that used to mean he was about to mouth off. The phantom scrape of a chair. The tug at her attention that felt like someone leaning over her shoulder. Nothing.

When Misty came by with tea and tarot, V leaned forward over the table like the layout could ping a precise ETA. The Hanged Man, Temperance, The Star. Misty spoke soft about sacrifice, patience and hope. V’s mouth tipped at one corner. Of course. Patience. Hope. Alt’s least favorite words. She plucked The Star between thumb and forefinger, turned it with a little snap. “Cool. He’s just lost in traffic,” she said dryly.

Misty’s gaze flicked up, gentle and wounding all at once. “Could be about you.”

“Mm,” V said, which was safer than yes.

She didn’t remember thinking, not really. Thoughts were fragmented, brittle shards of something she didn’t recognize as her own. Pain was the only thing she remembered—the kind that gnawed in quiet, patient, unavoidable loops, like some cruel metronome reminding her that she was still alive, and alive alone. That in itself was a bitter, almost ironic joke. Survival. Alone.

V remembered the ride home, though she barely remembered being in the car. Misty drove, and somewhere in the haze of fluorescent lights, after a week of barely registering a world outside of pain and drugs, the megabuilding loomed like a monument to all the wrong choices she’d ever made. Konpeki had been bad enough; this was worse. By the time they reached her apartment, she could feel the panic coiling inside her chest like a live wire, sharp and spitting sparks. It didn’t matter that Misty was there. It was too quiet, too empty, too permanent.

The attack hit before she even reached the door. Heart hammering, lungs fighting against some invisible weight, she felt herself shattering from the inside out. The seizure came almost immediately after—the body reacting faster than her mind could catch up. Misty caught her, steadying, murmuring, doing whatever it was she always did to keep V from hurting herself further.

She was pathetic. Truly. A grown-ass merc, a survivor of far too many hells, reduced to convulsing and puking on her own floor because the apartment was too much, the quiet too loud, the absence too heavy. Misty didn’t judge. She just stayed—made sure she didn’t croak in her sleep.

The first night alone—that attempt—was a catastrophe. She cried until she couldn’t breathe, until her stomach rebelled and puked what little remnants of her last meal were left. Seizures punctuated the night, shaking her down to some raw, exposed nerve, until she was left with nothing but the taste of bile, sweat, and regret on her tongue. Even her own body turned against her, a reminder that living without someone who had been everything was more than she could endure.

Misty stayed for a few days after that. She slept beside V, checked every breath, every twitch. She didn’t try to coddle her with words or smiles that would only have rung false. She just existed there, steady, a grounding force, a reminder that at least one person in the world cared enough to keep V tethered to it.

V hated herself for it, hated how small and helpless she felt despite all she’d survived, all she’d done. She wanted to believe she was strong, untouchable, unbreakable. Instead, she was this: curled up, shivering, crying, puking, shaking in the aftermath of a fight she couldn’t even name. Pathetic, all the way down.

And yet the worst part wasn’t the pain, wasn’t the sickness, wasn’t even the raw, jagged heartbreak that had settled into her chest like a permanent resident. The worst part was the loneliness. No Johnny. Just the echo of all the things she’d lost and the terrifying weight of the things she might never get back.

Then one day Misty was gone, and V woke up to the silence like it was a new kind of sound. No soft footsteps, no hushed humming of some half-forgotten tune. Just her. Alone again. Strangely—she was better. Not healed, not fixed, not even close. But better. It was like the body had finally recalibrated itself, decided to stop punishing her for surviving. She was still dying, of course, but that had stopped being news a long time ago. Mostly, she was just so goddamn tired of waiting for it. Waiting for death had turned into its own full-time job, the kind with no pay, no benefits, and the constant possibility of being fired for something you didn’t even do.

It had only been two weeks. Two weeks since she crawled out of Vik’s clinic and back into whatever this life was supposed to be and she still felt like she’d been hollowed out with a rusted spoon. Somehow Kerry Eurodyne had become the one constant in her little fucked-up recovery.

He wasn’t a savior, thank God. He wasn’t there to fix her or talk about her “journey” or any other self-help crap. He was just… there. Showing up. Taking her out for food when she forgot that food existed, shoving a coffee into her hands before she could protest, making sure she didn’t vanish into that apartment the way she’d been vanishing into herself.

He was a real angel about it, in the way only someone completely done with his own demons could be an angel. Not hovering, not prying, just steady. He got it, even if he didn’t say it. Maybe especially because he didn’t say it.

He was quick—thank Christ—on the uptake. He’d tried to mention Johnny once, back when his own grief had leaked through whatever filter he used. Just a name, dropped like a match onto a dry field. V had crumpled so fast she barely remembered falling apart, panic clawing its way up her throat like a live animal. After that, he never mentioned him again. Just the silence where Johnny’s name used to be.

It was the greatest gift anyone could’ve given her. Not pretending he’d never existed—she could never manage that herself—but allowing her to exist without being forced to confront it every time she opened her mouth. The absence was hard enough without having to dissect it in public.

So Kerry became this strange, quiet comfort. A presence she hadn’t expected, hadn’t asked for, but was glad she had. He didn’t hover like Misty, didn’t nurse her like Vik. He just existed alongside her, steady and unremarkable in the way that only someone famous could manage to be.

Sometimes, when he was driving her through the city in that absurdly expensive car of his, windows tinted and music turned down to a heartbeat, she caught herself feeling almost normal. Not happy, not healed, but normal. She never said any of it to him, of course. Words were too heavy these days, but when she looked over at him, sunglasses reflecting the endless neon, she felt that flicker of gratitude rise like a pulse.

Kerry didn’t need her thanks. He didn’t even need her to be okay. He just needed her to keep showing up.

Surprisingly, there was also Rogue. In her own infuriating, larger-than-life way, had taken V under her wing. Not like some babysitter or nurse, but more like a mercenary-mother hybrid who had no time for bullshit and even less patience for self-pity. It was strange. Comfortable, in a way that made V uneasy because she wasn’t used to comfort anymore. Not real comfort, anyway. Rogue didn’t sugarcoat anything. She didn’t ask how she was feeling or try to medicate her grief with hollow reassurances. She just acted. She gave orders, pushed her, reminded her to eat, to move, to keep going, and sometimes, just sometimes, let her sit in silence without a single word.

V figured it was because there wasn’t really anyone else who understood what losing Johnny felt like. That knowledge—the gnawing, pervasive absence of someone who had been everything—wasn’t something you could explain to someone who hadn’t been part of that mess, hadn’t had their head split open and their heart stolen by a hallucination-turned-soulmate. Rogue already had a lifetime of experience with that kind of loss, with watching someone she cared about disappear, whether literally or figuratively. And so, in her own rough, uncompromising way, she was giving V something to do.

Even when V couldn’t possibly think about solo runs, about gigs, Rogue provided structure. A mission. A task. Even if the task was mundane—checking ammo, repairing a gun, running a quick recon—there was a rhythm to it, a reason to be upright instead of sprawled on her couch pretending she was already dead. There were no lectures, no judgments, just the quiet expectation that she’d show up and perform. And so she did, because if she didn’t, Rogue would glare at her until she did. And that glare? It was more terrifying than any gunfight.

V discovered that the daily rhythm, the mundane actions of someone alive, were their own kind of salvation. It meant she couldn’t collapse into the weight of being broken. There was no time to sit with the exhaustion and acceptance of death; Rogue made sure of that. Even if V wanted to curl into herself and disappear into that haze of misery, she couldn’t. Rogue would pull her out, yank her into the light—or at least somewhere halfway decent—and demand she keep moving.

It was strange, almost ridiculous. Here she was, supposed to be dying, and yet Rogue treated her like she was someone who still mattered. Someone who still had skills, still had value, still had a right to move through the world, even if the clock was ticking like a taunt in her chest. And for the first time since the Tower, V realized that maybe she didn’t need to spend every second waiting for death. Maybe she could do something else first.

Even when her body screamed with pain and exhaustion, even when the memory of Johnny clawed through her mind like a phantom she could never touch, Rogue’s presence forced her to live. Not fully, not joyously, not without scars—but alive enough to remember she could.

So that was it. She drifted between the roles like they were masks she could put on at will—Rogue’s little fixer baby, scuttling along in her wake, taking orders, learning the ropes, patching herself together, and then, with a snap of her fingers, she was Kerry’s plaything, the guest of honor in a world made of gold chains and champagne fizz, of expensive restaurants, of shopping sprees that left her apartment smelling of new leather and overpriced perfume.

The whole reticule of excess—it got out of hand. Maybe it always would. Maybe it was inevitable. She floated through it all, buoyed by the numbness that had replaced heartbreak with distraction. Money, drugs, champagne, vintage luxury brands, bottles that gleamed under club lights like tiny promises—she took it all, let it pour over her like a river she didn’t deserve but couldn’t resist. Kerry had the perfect smile for it, the kind that said, I know exactly what you need, and V, god help her, took it.

She knew she was falling into all his old vices. Every manic tendency, every reckless streak, every thrill-seeking impulse—Johnny had left behind more than memories; he’d left a template. She followed it religiously. And, truth be told, she should have been expecting this. She’d been so blended with him at the end, so entangled in his rhythm, in his chaos, that the outcome was hardly surprising. It was like she was performing a part she already knew the lines to, a role she’d practiced without realizing it. The difference was now it was all hers, and yet, strangely, it wasn’t.

She stole through Kerry’s closet—jackets, golden chains, watches that gleamed under her fingernails like proof she was still alive. Every acquisition was a small rebellion, a wink at the chaos that had built her life into fragments. She never actually fucked him, though. Not once. Plenty of opportunity, plenty of nights wrapped in velvet and shadows and liquor, and yet she couldn’t. She didn’t want to. That part—what was left of her soul, maybe, or the residue of Johnny’s ghost—wouldn’t allow it.

She fell into the nightlife, the excess, the manic spinning of glittered hours and neon lights. Kerry, of course, followed her like a doting guardian who could anticipate every step she was about to take. She thought she was running away, thought she was drowning in something else, anything else, to keep the edges of Johnny’s memory from cutting too deep. In a way, it worked. Pain was muted. Heartache dulled. Her mania, her reckless energy, became a shield she could hide behind.

Afterparties got messy. Hotels that smelled like stale perfume and cheap alcohol, rooms thick with smoke. She watched herself from the inside, a half-detached spectator, thinking, This is all Johnny. None of this is V. And yet, it hurt less. That was the cruel irony. It hurt less precisely because she wasn’t fully herself in those moments, because the thrill of movement and danger and indulgence, let her bypass the sharp knife of grief that otherwise threatened to cut her open.

She stole a bottle of champagne from a private suite once, popped it open in the bathroom, watching the bubbles rise and cling to the sides of the glass. Toasted to what? To Johnny, to herself, to the absurdity of surviving? She wasn’t sure. She didn’t care. The irony of it was that survival felt like a joke, a prank played by the universe, and she was laughing through the residue of trauma because she could.

Kerry didn’t lecture. He didn’t interfere. He was perfect in that sense, a rock-solid presence in a world that had spun out of its axis. He made sure she ate, that she slept, that she didn’t actually fall apart completely, even while letting her take the reins of her own chaos. It was comforting enough that she could chase the ghosts of Johnny’s vices without fear of truly self-destructing.

The irony sat like a lump in her chest. She knew she was mimicking the life of a man who had been half-phantom, half-perfect nightmare, yet in the mimicry, she found a strange sort of peace. It was manic, absurd, ridiculous, and maybe pathetic, but it was hers, and she could bear it because the alternative was drowning in memory, in grief, in the specter of him that refused to leave her alone.

V didn’t stop. She couldn’t. She wasn’t ready to. For the first time since Mikoshi, she was moving, spinning, alive—at least enough to feel the absurd thrill of surviving, even if only through chaos.

It went on for months, that carousel between Rogue and Kerry, as if she were some half-functioning automaton stuck on repeat. Rogue gave her work, Kerry gave her distraction, and V—well, V was still dying, unfortunately. Death wasn’t shy about reminding her, either. Her chrome started sputtering like a dying lightbulb, optics glitching, joints locking, processor skipping whole beats of reality. Her hair thinned, patches gone brittle in her fingers. Seizures came without invitation, slamming her to the ground like cruel reminders that her body was a lease past expiration.

And still, she lived it up. Champagne foamed over crystal rims, lines of powder vanished off mirrors, afterparties blurred one into the next. With Kerry on her arm, it almost looked convincing: some tragic starlet living too fast, vintage designer labels clinging to her body like armor. If Johnny had been around, he would’ve laughed himself hoarse. Or maybe he’d have just lit another cigarette and called it what it was: pathetic.

She had started pulling away from the people who actually gave a damn. Vik, Misty, Panam—every call she ignored, every meet she canceled. Easier to drown herself in noise than face their pity, their concern. She told herself she was sparing them, when in truth she was just sparing herself the reminder that she was circling the drain. True Silverhand style: torch every bridge, burn every friend, laugh like it doesn’t sting.

They really were one and the same, her and Johnny. She could admit it now, in the absence of his voice. The way she slammed doors on the people she cared for, the way she ran headfirst into excess like pain couldn’t catch her if she just stayed loud enough, drunk enough, numb enough. If the crash was coming, may as well make it spectacular.

By the end of the third month, her body finally called bullshit. She didn’t remember much of the overdose—just snippets. Music rattling the walls at some hotel suite afterparty, too many glasses stacked on the table, Kerry’s hand brushing hers as he laughed at something that wasn’t funny. A pill pressed into her palm, another line cut on glass, and then nothing. Just the feeling of her lungs locking up, heart skipping too far, and then black.

She woke up in a hospital bed, white light stabbing through her retinas, machines beeping out a steady song of failure. Kerry was there, sunglasses crooked on his nose, slouched in the chair like a man who hadn’t slept in a century. He didn’t say I told you so. Didn’t say much at all, just stared at her like he was trying to decide whether to shake her or hold her.

V laughed, voice raw and broken, because of course it had come to this. Of course the grand finale to her impersonation of Johnny Silverhand was an overdose. What else was she supposed to do with borrowed time? Knit sweaters?

It should’ve scared her more than it did but all she felt was tired. Dying was one thing. Living like this—constantly running from the inevitable, chasing highs that didn’t stick—was worse. And yet, she knew she wasn’t about to stop.

She let herself drift back into the hum of hospital machines, thinking how Johnny would’ve loved the irony.

She was in the second stage of grief throughout it all—anger. A full-time job, with overtime and benefits. Not the dignified kind either, but the messy, ugly, teeth-bared kind that kept her alive when she probably should’ve already checked out.

Anger at Johnny, mostly. For leaving her to die like this. For cutting out just when she’d finally gotten used to him in her head, finally started thinking maybe the universe wasn’t completely off its rocker to jam their souls together. He hadn’t really had a choice—she knew that—but grief didn’t give a shit about reason. It just burned, and it burned with his name stamped all over it.

Then there was fate, that cruel little bastard. Fate had dealt her the losing hand before the cards were even shuffled. What were the odds? One merc, scraping by, getting tangled in corpo bullshit so far above her paygrade it might as well have been a cosmic joke. The relic shoved in her head, a deadline carved into her skull, and Johnny Silverhand as the cherry on top.

And Jackie. Goddamn Jackie. Her brother, her partner, the man who was supposed to have her back. She loved him, missed him, would’ve given anything to have him alive again. And yet—fuck him. For taking that Konpeki job, for talking her into it with that big grin and bigger dreams, for not being here now when everything came crashing down. She couldn’t scream at Johnny. She couldn’t punch fate in the face. But Jackie? Jackie was safe to blame, because he was already long gone.

V carried it all inside her, a nest of hornets buzzing too loud to think straight. The rage was the only thing that felt alive in her anymore. Rage at Johnny, rage at Jackie, rage at the cruel joke of existing when her body was failing piece by piece.

People liked to say anger kept you moving. That was true, technically. It kept her up long enough to stumble into Kerry’s car, or into Rogue’s office, or onto another party floor sticky with spilled liquor. It kept her sharp enough to still throw a punch when some jackass at a club thought her weakness meant easy prey. It didn’t give her peace. Not even close.

If she was honest, anger was just easier than the alternative. Easier to curse Johnny for leaving than to admit she missed him so much she couldn’t breathe. Easier to spit venom at Jackie’s memory than to let herself collapse under the grief. Easier to scream at fate than to sit still and watch death creep closer with every seizure.

So yeah, she was angry. That was stage two, wasn’t it? She figured she’d stay there a while. Denial had already blown past her like a bullet train—hard to deny you’re dying when your body glitches out mid-sentence. Bargaining? Who the fuck was she gonna bargain with? God? No thanks. Depression… well, that was waiting for her, patient as a vulture. And acceptance? Acceptance could kiss her ass.

It was a few days after the OD when Rogue finally cornered her. Figures. Kerry couldn’t keep his mouth shut—probably thought he was doing her a favor. Next thing she knew, she was hauled into Afterlife’s backroom like some kid caught boosting chrome from the market stalls.

Rogue didn’t even let her stand. She shoved V down onto one of those pristine leather couches. The queen of Afterlife herself stood there, arms folded, eyes narrowed, wearing that look of barely concealed worry wrapped in contempt. The one that said she cared but wished she didn’t.

“So,” Rogue started, voice flat as gunmetal. “I hear you’re trying to check out early. Didn’t figure you for sloppy, V.”

V snorted, wry. “Guess I’m full of surprises.”

That earned her a glare. Rogue sat down across from her, leaning forward, elbows on knees. “You think you’re the first to lose him? You’re not special. He’s gone and if you keep this shit up, so are you.”

There it was. The motherly reprimand, Afterlife style. No soft hands, no gentle words—just cold steel dipped in truth.

V stared at her boots, tracing cracks in the floor. “Yeah, well. Maybe that’s the idea.”

Silence stretched between them. When Rogue finally spoke again, her voice had lost some of its edge. “I lost him once too, you know.” She said it like it cost her something. “You don’t forget that kind of hurt. You just… learn to live with it.”

V laughed, short and ugly. “Live with it. Easy for you to say.”

He was just her shitty boyfriend. V had him in her head. Every second, every goddamn breath. He wasn’t just some fling. He was half her soul. That’s what he’d been. Half her fucking soul. But she wasn’t about to say it out loud. Not to Rogue.

“He’s not here now,” Rogue said, reading her silence anyway. “That’s the point. And if you keep running around like you’re chasing his ghost, you’re gonna kill yourself.”

V finally looked up, met Rogue’s stare. Those sharp green eyes hadn’t dulled a bit over the decades. They looked like they could see right through her, down to the rotten, broken mess inside.

“You think I don’t know?” V muttered. “That I’m circling the drain? So maybe let me have my fun while it lasts.”

Rogue didn’t flinch. “Fun doesn’t look like OD’ing on Kerry’s floor, V.”

That one landed. V swallowed, turned her gaze back to her boots. What was there to say? Rogue wasn’t wrong. She hated that she wasn’t wrong.

The silence returned, thicker this time. Finally, Rogue leaned back, exhaling heavily. “I get it,” she said quietly. “I really do. But don’t think for a second you’re the only one who’s ever had to crawl out of that pit. Stop trying to kill yourself faster than you already are.”

V didn’t answer. Couldn’t. She just sat there, hollow, listening to her own pulse echo in her ears. Maybe Rogue thought she was getting through. Maybe Kerry hoped dragging her here would fix her. The truth was, nothing could touch the black hole eating her alive from the inside.

All she could think, bitter and cruel, was that Rogue was wrong. She was special. Because no one else would ever know what it was like to lose Johnny Silverhand the way she had—soul ripped in half, left to rot while the other half dissolved into light.

She didn’t say that either.

Three months in, there was a turn. Not a big one, not some cinematic moment where her life clicked back into focus. Some guy—if you could call him that—wandered into Afterlife and started talking like he had a solution to V’s “problem,” which, according to him, was dying.

She honestly hadn’t thought of it as a problem for a while. Dying had sort of downgraded from “life-ending catastrophe” to “background noise” somewhere between seizure number twelve and waking up in Kerry’s pool without remembering how she got there. Not fun, but inevitable.

Rogue latched onto it. Solution to the problem. Like she’d been waiting for this exact moment to swoop in with some big fix, hand V a purpose and maybe salvage a life or two. V just stared at the guy, all cool detachment, because she didn’t have the energy to pretend anymore.

He was shady as fuck. Not even in the “guy-in-a-dark-alley” kind of way, but in the “maybe-not-actually-human” way. His eyes glowed—constantly flickering with blue data transfers, like someone had jammed a holoscreen into his skull and forgot to turn off the demo mode. His skin had that too-smooth texture that made her think of dolls. AI, probably. Or some corporate pet project gone rogue. Creepy as hell, but not in a surprising way.

V didn’t think about it. She didn’t think about much anymore. The man—thing—talked, words pouring out about solutions, transfers, corporate theft. She just sat there, chin propped on her palm, eyes glazing over.

“V,” Rogue cut in, voice sharp, “you’re taking this one.”

That got her attention. “What?” she said flatly.

“You heard me.” Rogue’s tone brooked no argument. “If there’s even a chance this could help—”

“Could help me not die?” V snorted. “Newsflash, Rogue, I’m not exactly invested in that project anymore.”

Rogue’s glare could’ve burned through steel. “You’re going. End of story.”

V wanted to laugh, but it came out as a sigh. “Fine. Whatever. Another suicide run. Haven’t had one of those in, what, a week?”

The man’s glowing eyes flickered as if he was amused. “You’ll be raiding the Crystal Palace for information. Retrieval only.”

“Retrieval,” V repeated, deadpan. “Yeah. Sounds safe.”

She didn’t even ask what the Crystal Palace was. She knew. Everybody knew. That monstrous orbital pleasure dome turned fortress—the corporate playground where the rich got to pretend they were gods while orbiting above a world they’d gutted. A suicide mission, plain and simple, and here she was, nodding along, because Rogue said so.

It wasn’t courage. It wasn’t even duty. It was just inertia.

Rogue gave her that look again, the one that said she’d drag V there by the hair if she had to. “Get some sleep,” she muttered.

Sleep. Right. V nodded, stood, walked out of Afterlife like she was sleepwalking. Another job, another shot at not-dying that would probably end with her bleeding out in some sterile corridor above the Earth she’d never see whole again.

She wondered, briefly, if she’d even care enough to fight back this time.

Still, it launched her into another stage of grief—bargaining. She hadn’t realized she’d been moving through them like stations on a bad commuter line, but here she was. First denial, then anger, now this: bargaining. The most ridiculous stage of all.

She didn’t even know who she was bargaining with. God? The AI? Rogue? Herself? Some quiet part of her that still thought maybe she’d walk out of all this alive and intact? Didn’t matter. The whispers had started anyway.

Maybe she’d succeed. Maybe this would be the one time the hail-Mary actually worked. Maybe she wouldn’t die bleeding and alone, surrounded by strangers. Maybe she’d come back from the Crystal Palace with more than scars and a headache.

Maybe she’d live. Not for long—she knew the numbers, the projections, the finality stamped into her bones—but even a few more months, a year, two. Maybe that would be enough. Enough to claw her way out of this spiral. Enough to find some thread of Johnny again, if there was even a thread to find.

If that was even possible.

She doubted it. Probability was a bitch, and the universe wasn’t known for mercy. But the maybes were there anyway, creeping into the corners of her head like little parasites, spinning impossible futures. Futures where she succeeded, where she lived, where she somehow dragged him back from wherever Alt had dropped him. Futures where she wasn’t dying in slow motion while pretending she wasn’t scared.

She caught herself thinking about it, felt the old self-loathing twist in her gut, and snorted. Bargaining. Yeah. As if there was anyone left to bargain with. As if fate gave a damn about her plans.

But still she thought it. Still she made the deals in her head, ridiculous, whispered, frantic: if she survived this, she’d get clean, she’d stop the drugs, she’d claw her way back to something resembling life. If she survived, she’d try to be someone better than this hollowed-out version of herself.

And maybe—God help her—maybe she’d even find Johnny. Somehow.

She did it all. Prepared the gig, lined her gear, checked her weapons, polished her half-dead body like it mattered. And then she went up there, to the Palace. If you were going to die anywhere, why not in orbit, surrounded by glittering wealth and suits who’d never even brushed shoulders with real dirt? She hadn’t really thought she’d come back. Hell, she’d half-counted on it. The one-way ticket that Rogue strong-armed her into taking.

By some cosmic joke she survived.

Didn’t remember most of it, though.

She had hazy impressions, flashes, jagged edges of nightmare: Angels, they were called. Cute, right? Nothing angelic about them. Elite task force stationed up there, soulless chrome wrapped in prettier chrome, killing machines dressed in corporate dogma. They fucked her up worse than Adam Smasher ever managed. Smasher was blunt force trauma. The Angels were knives under the ribs, pulled slow, savoring. Even thinking back, her stomach turned. She remembered bleeding, choking, the burn of zero-G in her lungs like fire.

Then—nothing.

Her brain just switched off, sealed the memories away in some trauma vault where she couldn’t reach them, and maybe that was mercy. People called it a trauma response. She called it her gray little miracle: she didn’t remember shit. Probably for the better.

But she must have done it. Stolen whatever data the shady, glowing-eyed AI bastard had sent her after. Must have lived, must have made it back down, because here she was. Alive. Breathing. More or less.

“Cure” was a funny word, turned out.

Three months gone. Out cold while the entity poked and rewired, stripped away the failing chrome, left her with skin and meat and scar tissue where once there’d been blades and enhancements. Three months in a coma, floating between nothing and nightmares, Misty sitting vigil while Rogue checked in and Kerry drank himself through the silence. She woke up lighter. Diminished.

Partial disability, they called it. She called it another joke. Half the shit she used to do was impossible now. Cyberware gutted, nervous system fried, her body humming at half-speed like a junkyard ripperdoc’s patch job. The cure wasn’t a cure at all—just an extension.

And she was still fucking dying.

Only now it would be years instead of months. Neurodegenerative disorder. Some terminal, unpronounceable clusterfuck. Her brain dissolving itself slowly, a glitching relic without the Relic. Funny how that worked. First Arasaka puts a ticking time bomb in her skull, then an AI beyond the Blackwall swoops in and “saves” her by planting another one, longer fuse this time.

V stared at herself in Vik’s mirror when she was finally allowed up, hands trembling against the sink, hair thinning, muscle wasted. The black circles under her eyes had gone from fashionably cyberpunk to sickroom chic. Her movements stiff, balance off. A half-meat, half-ghost mess.

Alive. Wasn’t that the cruelest part?

She laughed the first time she caught herself calling it a miracle. A miracle was living when Jackie didn’t. A miracle was the way Johnny had once kissed her so hard she’d forgotten she was dying. A miracle was not this. Not half-life, not partial freedom, not the open road with a locked gate waiting at the end.

Still. She had years which meant more nights, more drugs, more whiskey with Kerry, more long silences on Rogue’s couch where grief hung between. More time to make bad choices, to claw at the remnants of herself before the sickness peeled it all away.

Every time she tried to think about the Palace, her chest tightened. Not fear, not even anger—just a blankness that made her teeth ache. She wanted to remember, to see if the memory held anything worth keeping, anything Johnny would have laughed at or cursed over, but all she got was static.

She lit another cigarette, hands trembling, smoke curling in her lungs like defiance.

At least the AI was happy.

She always got the short end of the stick.

She couldn’t well work now. Not as a merc, not as a fixer, not even as some washed-up consultant who traded stories of blood for eddies. No chrome meant no edge, and in Night City, no edge meant you were prey. Didn’t matter if you had the best trigger finger in Watson once upon a time—without the steel, you were just another body waiting to hit the pavement. V wasn’t quite suicidal enough to tempt fate with that.

Sad, maybe. But when the fuck had her life been anything but sad?

The others had their lives. Rogue buried herself in Afterlife politics, Misty spoke to ghosts only she could see, Vik patched up people who still had a chance of surviving the mess they made of themselves. V was a ghost with a pulse, floating between one day and the next.

Which was how she ended up with Kerry.

Of course it was Kerry. The only constant left, besides Vik’s quiet patience and Misty’s mysticism. Kerry, with his songs and his ego that never quite shrank to fit the room. Kerry, who could look at her with glassy eyes over a half-empty bottle and say, “Well, guess we’re both still here, huh?” as if that counted for anything.

They lived it up, again. The old spiral. Drugs, drinks, nights that bled into sunrises neither of them really wanted to see. Limousines and penthouses, trashed hotel suites.

She loved him. She did. In her way, the only way she had left, but love didn’t make them good for each other, never had. He was brittle, and she was poison.

It was too familiar.

She knew it in the marrow of her bones—the way his gaze caught on her when she was three drinks under and laughing too hard, the way his shoulders slumped when she stumbled into the old Silverhand routine without meaning to. She was more like Johnny now than she’d ever been, stripped of her merc’s armor, raw nerves and reckless heart exposed. Kerry had already survived one Silverhand-shaped hurricane.

It hadn’t been healthy for him back then. It wasn’t healthy now.

The Silverhand spiral, redux. Only this time with her own special flavor. Less politics, more painkillers. Less “burn the system,” more “burn the night because what else is left?”

She’d catch herself sometimes, words spilling out in Johnny’s cadence, his swagger ghosting her body like a muscle memory she couldn’t shake. Kerry’s jaw would tighten, and he’d drown it in another shot. Neither of them said it aloud.

They were good at pretending. Pretending it was love enough to keep the edges soft. Pretending the laughter wasn’t manic. Pretending that waking up in each other’s arms made the morning less empty.

Different poison, same dose.

And wasn’t that the story of her life?

Depression didn’t come like a thunderclap, didn’t strike hard or loud. It seeped in slow, quiet as a leak, until the whole floor rotted out from under her.

She all but moved out of her new fancy apartment—the one Rogue had insisted she get before the so-called cure, with its floor-to-ceiling windows and high-thread-count linens. Too empty, too big, too sterile. She couldn’t stand it.

V stayed, more often than not, in Kerry’s mansion.

Big wasn’t any less hollow there, but at least the emptiness had music. The walls carried echoes—Kerry’s guitar, his temper, his laughter, his silences. It was still lonely, but it wasn’t the same kind of lonely as that apartment. And if she drowned in his mess instead of hers, if she curled up on his leather couches or in his king-sized bed with its tangled sheets and ashtrays perched too close to the nightstand, then at least she wasn’t listening to her own pulse thrum against the void.

V’d thought maybe it would be all tragic poetry—staring out windows at the city lights, smoking cigarettes down to the filter, sighing into the night. Instead it was sleeping until dusk, headaches that didn’t go away, half-eaten takeout containers forgotten on the floor. It was hair clumping in the drain, hands shaking too much to thread a cigarette. It was drifting through Kerry’s halls in one of his shirts, oversized and smelling faintly of him, and realizing she hadn’t changed clothes in days.

Kerry didn’t ask her to leave. Maybe he was too used to ghosts of Silverhand past haunting his house to notice when a new one settled in. Mostly he just let her be.

Sometimes he tried. He’d drag her out to parties, clubs, rooftop bars where the champagne never stopped flowing. She’d play along, drink too much, and for a few hours she could pretend she wasn’t dragging her grief like chains behind her. Then the lights would flicker, the music would fade, and she’d remember. Always, she remembered.

Other times, he let her collapse. No judgment, no pity—just a quiet presence beside her, or the sound of him strumming a guitar in another room. That helped, in a way. It kept her tethered.

Depression was heavy in her limbs, heavy in her thoughts. Heavy in the way she’d stand in Kerry’s bathroom, staring at her reflection and not recognize the woman who looked back. No chrome. No merc’s swagger. Just a girl with thinning hair, shadows under her eyes, a body betraying her inch by inch.

She hated mirrors.

But she didn’t move back into her own apartment. Couldn’t. At least in Kerry’s house, there was clutter, sound, the illusion of life. If she filled the silence with his noise, well—maybe that was enough to get through another day.

For better or worse, she had gotten good at surviving.

They were lying in Kerry’s bed, sprawled across the wreck of sheets that never seemed to stay tucked in, when the words just slipped out of her.

“I miss him.”

She didn’t say the name. They never talked about it—mutual agreement, unwritten rule, survival instinct. But the ache in her chest had gotten too sharp to swallow down.

For a moment, Kerry was still. Then he let out a breath, one of those long, weary sighs that sounded like he’d been holding it for twenty years. His arm tightened around her shoulders, drawing her in until her head rested against his chest, the steady thrum of his heart loud in her ear.

“Yeah,” he said, voice rough. “I miss the bastard too.”

That was it. No flourish, no speech, just that bare truth.

V closed her eyes. It wasn’t comfort, not really, but it was something. He didn’t push her, didn’t tell her it would get better, didn’t slap some Hallmark bullshit on the wound. He just held her, father-like or brother-like—roles she didn’t have the headspace to dissect. She only knew it felt safe, the closest thing to safe she’d felt in months.

“I keep thinking…” Her throat burned, but she forced the words out. “If I’d just—”

“Stop.” Kerry’s tone cut sharper than the edge of a broken bottle. He shifted, enough to look at her, eyes dark with something she didn’t want to name. “Don’t do that to yourself.”

“But—”

“No.” His hand squeezed her shoulder, firm, grounding. “Johnny never let anyone make his calls for him. You know that better than anyone.”

Her mouth twisted, half a bitter laugh, half a sob. “Yeah. Fucking stubborn asshole.”

Kerry huffed something that might’ve been a laugh, might’ve been grief trying on another mask. “That he was.”

Silence stretched, thick but not suffocating. V could hear the faint tick of one of Kerry’s antique clocks somewhere in the house, the city hum beyond the gated walls. She pressed her face into his shirt, breathing in cigarette smoke and expensive cologne.

“Thanks,” she murmured, voice muffled.

“For what?”

“Not telling me to get over it.”

Kerry’s chest rumbled under her ear, another sigh, softer this time. “Kid, you don’t get over someone like him.”

She let that sit. Heavy truth, but better than the empty promises Misty fed her, or the hard pragmatism Rogue threw like knives. Kerry wasn’t trying to fix her, just holding her together for one more night.

It was months later—months of grinding through half-life, half-death, the sort of stretch of time where days bled into each other so much she sometimes had to ask Kerry what month it was—that the thought hit her like a bullet she never saw coming.

She’d been lying in the big ridiculous bed in Kerry’s guest room that wasn’t hers but kind of was now, staring at the plaster ceiling. The sudden clarity came uninvited, one of those truths that slid beneath the skin and stuck there, raw and undeniable. She’d lived longer without Johnny than she’d lived with him.

The timeline worked out. Simple math. Brutal math. A few months with him, if she was generous with the definition, stretching the chaos of their beginning into something that could pass as “together.” And now—more than a year without.

It should have broke her, she thought. Should have reopened every wound and reminded her of every empty night. Instead, she only felt this strange, cool distance like Johnny had become someone she used to know, a figure blurred into abstraction. The memory of pain was still there, sure, but dulled—more scar tissue than open gash.

Johnny Silverhand: terrorist, pain in the ass, accidental soulmate. Now? Now just a name, an echo.

She rolled over, restless, her implant-less body still aching in ways Vik said were “normal”. (Yeah, sure, nothing about her life had ever been normal.) Kerry’s place was too quiet, the house practically groaning under the weight of its wealth. She reached for her holo, more out of boredom than intent.

Then she did it.

Typed his name into a search bar.

Johnny Silverhand.

Unhinged behavior, she knew it the second her thumb tapped confirm. She almost laughed—almost heard his smug voice in her skull, teasing her for googling him like some starstruck groupie. She should’ve dropped the holo right then, should’ve rolled over and forced herself to sleep.

But the net vomited up images like it had been waiting all this time, an endless sprawl of him. Concert stills, screaming crowds, sweat-slicked hair. Magazine spreads, carefully lit photoshoots where the rebellion was styled into sex appeal. Fuck, even paparazzi shots where he was snarling at cameras, cigarette hanging from his lips.

And there it was. Him shirtless, guitar slung low, veins popping, grin stretched sharp enough to cut glass.

She stared too long.

Scrolled further. Him in leather, in mesh, in nothing but his ego. And then—oh, fuck her sideways—him in a dark tailored suit, aviators on, lounging like he owned the goddamn world. Which, back then, he probably thought he did. The grin, the posture, the deliberate way the shot leaned into sin.

Something in her belly twisted, sharp, hot. It was… a revelation.

Because she hadn’t felt that in so long—not lust, not want, not that old aching pull low in her gut that made her body hers again for a split second. Since Johnny was in her head, she realized. Since before her life got rewired into this tragedy.

She swore under her breath, voice cracking against the silence of Kerry’s mansion, but her hand was already moving, traitorous, slipping down under the waistband of her panties. The shame of it hit almost as hard as the relief, but she couldn’t stop because it was him. That cocky grin, that sharp jawline, the aviators hiding eyes she knew were burning black. Johnny Silverhand, in a fucking suit.

Her breath hitched. Fingers pressed. And for the first time in over a year, she let herself fall apart.

After, lying there in the dark, heart still thrumming wild, she wanted to laugh. Wanted to cry. She pressed her palms over her face and thought, Christ, I’m fucked in the head.

True fangirl behavior. Masturbating to ancient photoshoots of a dead rockstar who also happened to be the ghost that once lived in her skull. Therapy would’ve had a field day with that, if she’d ever let herself go.

But the strangest part? The ache was still there, but different now. He wasn’t just Johnny the terrorist anymore—the chain-smoking, foul-mouthed nightmare who dragged her through fire. In her head, he started shifting, morphing. Becoming Johnny the Rockstar again—the figure on glossy paper, the one screaming into a mic with sweat dripping down his chest, the one who owned every room he walked into.

Somehow, that was easier.

Because Johnny Silverhand the terrorist was a wound that never closed. But Johnny Silverhand the Rockstar? That was myth, legend. Something she could want without it killing her. Something she could lust after without the guilt clawing at her ribs.

It didn’t stop with one late-night slip of the thumb. Of course it didn’t.

V knew herself well enough by now to admit that when she started spiraling, she didn’t so much dip a toe as dive headfirst into the pit. The next night, same bed, same too-big silence of Kerry’s mansion, she pulled up the holo again. Typed his name again. And just like before, the net served her everything it had, and she ate it up like a starving dog.

The Johnny in her memories—the one who argued, snarled, haunted—blurred a little more every night. In his place, a shinier version took root.

It was ironic, really. She’d spent months trying to scrape him out of her mind, months clawing her way out of grief just to survive a day without crumbling. Now she was bringing him back with open arms, only on her terms. Digitized, filtered, trapped in old press spreads.

There was something easier about wanting that Johnny. Glossy, curated Johnny. Not the one who bummed smokes in her head, not the one who called her sweetheart when she was crying herself raw. This Johnny was untouchable, safe in pixels and nostalgia. A fantasy she could control.

And yeah, sometimes she still touched herself to those shots. No point in lying to herself about it. It was pathetic, sure, but it was also the closest thing to pleasure she’d had in over a year, and fuck anyone who tried to shame her for it. She could almost hear Johnny’s laugh in her head—raspy, smug—teasing her for drooling over him like every other fan who once lined up outside dingy clubs just for a glimpse.

Maybe that’s why she kept doing it. It was like pulling him back, but softer. Not as ghost, not as parasite, not as soul-twin tearing her apart from the inside. Just as… Johnny Silverhand. Rockstar. Poster boy for chaos.

Sometimes she’d scroll through the shots and imagine herself there, front row in some sweaty club, watching him tear it up like it was religion. Maybe he’d glance her way. Maybe she’d meet his eyes over the crowd, catch that stupid grin. Maybe nothing would’ve come of it, but hell, at least it wouldn’t have ended with Mikoshi and six months to live.

The absurdity of it all hit her at random moments. She’d be brushing her teeth, glance at herself in the mirror, and think, Congratulations, V. You’ve officially downgraded from half-dead mercenary to creepy fangirl jerking off to old photos. It was so pathetic it circled back around to funny.

But she didn’t stop. Couldn’t, really. Because reimagining him as Johnny the Rockstar meant she didn’t have to sit with the other version—the one who broke her into pieces and glued her back together only to vanish. This way, she got to pick and choose. She could take the smirk without the guilt, the swagger without the blood.

Every so often, Kerry would catch her zoning out with the holo and roll his eyes, muttering something about her “developing new hobbies.” He never pried, though. Bless him for that. V figured he knew exactly what she was doing, and it was his silent mercy not to drag it into the light.

Weeks passed like this, a ritual she didn’t speak of. And somewhere along the way, Johnny stopped being the bleeding hole in her chest and started being the man in the photos—forever young, forever cocky, forever untouchable. The world had taken him from her, but in this strange, twisted way, she’d taken him back.

V figured it amounted to the final stage of grief—acceptance.

Didn’t mean she was suddenly healed, or that she had her shit together. Far from it. She was still a mess, only now the mess came with edges worn smooth by time, grief hollowed out into habit. It was like living with a scar you forgot you had until the weather turned damp and it ached. Johnny was that scar. Her whole body, her whole life, written in Johnny font.

So she accepted.

Accepted that she’d loved him, if you could call it that. Accepted that he’d broken her open and stitched himself into places no one had any business touching. Accepted that she’d never stop missing him, even on the days she hated him most.

It didn’t make her stronger. It just made her tired.

Acceptance didn’t fix the seizures, didn’t magic away the ticking clock Vik swore was still running in her head. She was still dying, that hadn’t changed, but at least she’d stopped trying to fight the current.

She woke up one morning in Kerry’s guest room, sunlight sneaking past blackout curtains, and realized she’d gone a whole night without dreaming of him. Without hearing his voice echo in her skull. For the first time in forever, silence.

It almost hurt worse than the rest.

She slid back into old habits like they’d been waiting for her all along. Nights blurred into mornings, the clock a suggestion, the city a fever dream. Living with Kerry meant there was always something on the table—bottles, powders, tabs—and she reached for it without thinking. Sometimes it felt like the closest thing to a routine she’d ever had. Sometimes it felt like she’d never left the Afterlife bathroom floor.

Kerry tried to keep pace, but his constitution wasn’t built like hers. He still had publicists, rehearsals, appearances. She just had a void to fill and no better tools than what he left lying around. Most of the time she was high enough that her body hummed. It was easier this way, easier not to think.

She kept telling herself it was temporary. She’d hit some bottom eventually, bounce off it, and crawl out. That’s what people did, right? They bottomed out. They bounced. She was just waiting for the bounce.

It was raining that night—not heavy, just a fine drizzle you could pretend was glitter if you squinted. Kerry had dragged her out of the house, said she’d rot in that guest room if she didn’t. She didn’t fight him. She let him pull her into some rooftop club in City Center, the kind of place that didn’t have a name, just a glowing sigil above the door. No one cared who you were as long as you looked expensive and kept moving.

Inside, everything pulsed. The walls throbbed with bass. Light cut the dark in shards—violet, gold, blue. The drizzle sneaked in from the open sides of the roof, misting skin, cooling her overheated body. She swayed first, then moved, then danced, the movement rising from somewhere under the haze. Kerry was at the bar talking to some neon-haired kid, but she didn’t care. She was already gone, letting the beat crawl under her ribs, slide down her spine.

For a flicker of a moment she forgot everything—who she’d been, what she’d lost, how far she’d fallen. She forgot the apartment she didn’t sleep in, the pills lined up on the bathroom sink, the way Kerry looked at her sometimes like he was bracing for bad news. In that single breath, dripping rain and sweat, she felt… not happy, exactly, but possible. Like maybe she could still claw her way back to something that resembled living.

She tilted her head back, let the mist hit her face, and thought she would be okay.

Eventually. She would be okay.

The next day she reached for the wrong thing in the wrong amount and overdosed again.

When V woke, her whole body screamed. Muscles ached, chest rattled, mouth dry as rust. The first thing she saw wasn’t Vik’s tired face or Misty hovering—it was Kerry, sunk into the chair beside her cot, sunglasses off, eyes red-rimmed.

For a moment she thought she’d finally crossed over, but then he shifted, leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and she knew she wasn’t that lucky.

“Back among the living,” Kerry muttered, voice sandpaper. “Again.”

She wanted to laugh, but it came out a cough. “Yeah. Cockroach syndrome. Won’t fucking die no matter what.”

He didn’t smile. Just stared at her, like he’d been sitting there for hours rehearsing whatever speech he was about to give. The silence stretched, long enough for her to hear the clinic hum, long enough for her to think maybe Vik was listening somewhere near.

Finally, Kerry sat back and pulled something from the pocket of his jacket. A small notebook. Spiral-bound, an honest-to-god pen clipped to the cover. He set it on the blanket over her lap.

She frowned. “The fuck’s this?”

“Paper,” he said flatly. “You know, analog storage device. Used before memory chips got cheap.”

“Funny.” She flicked at it with a finger, unimpressed. “You bring me homework or what?”

“Not homework. Therapy. Or something like it.” He raked a hand through his hair, and she realized how gray it was at the edges now. “God knows I don’t got the answers, V. Tried drinking ‘em, snorting ‘em, screaming ‘em into a mic for decades. Didn’t work. Johnny used to write, though. Whole world knows that. Figured maybe…”

Her throat tightened at the name. She shifted, wincing, trying to cover it up. “So what, I’m supposed to start a diary? ‘Dear fucking Diary, today I OD’d again’?”

Kerry’s mouth twitched, but it wasn’t a smile. “Maybe. Or maybe you just puke it onto the page. All the shit that’s eating you alive. Doesn’t matter if it makes sense. Doesn’t matter if you never read it back. Just—get it out of your mind, you know?”

She snorted, but softer than usual. “You sound like Misty.”

“Misty ain’t wrong.” He leaned forward, gaze sharp now. “And I’m fresh outta ideas, V. Tried talking. You don’t listen. Tried watching. Just about killed me. So now I’m telling you—write. Before you end up in here and Vik can’t pull you back.”

For a second, neither of them said anything. Something about it made her feel twelve again, like she should doodle in the margins and write secrets no one could read. She hated the way her chest tightened at the thought.

“…Maybe,” she muttered, fingers brushing the paper.

“Good.” Kerry sat back, let out a long breath like he’d been holding it for days. “That’s half the battle.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she shot back, though it lacked bite.

They sat in a rare kind of quiet, the clinic hum filling the spaces where their voices usually clashed. For once, it wasn’t unbearable.

Then Kerry ruined it.

“Gotta tell you something else.”

Her stomach dropped. “That tone? Don’t like it.”

“Too bad.” He shifted, bracing his elbows on his knees again. “You’re going to rehab.”

The words hit harder than any bullet she’d ever taken. She stared, unblinking, sure she’d misheard. “…What.”

“You heard me.”

“The fuck, Kerry. Rehab? Like I’m some washed-up corpo wife hooked on benzos?”

“You’re washed-up something, V. And you’re killing yourself in my house. You think I’m just gonna sit back and watch? Already buried one person I…” He stopped, jaw clenching. “Not doing it again.”

Her first instinct was to argue, to bite, to spit venom until he backed down. The words didn’t come. The fight just wasn’t there. She was too tired. Too wrung-out.

“And if I say no?” she asked finally.

Kerry’s eyes were steel now, steady in a way she didn’t see often. “Then I drag your ass there myself. You’ll hate me, but you’ll still be breathing.”

She looked at him, at the lines around his eyes, the strain in his shoulders. He was serious. Dead serious.

For once, she didn’t feel like fighting. She let her head fall back against the pillow, exhaling smoke that wasn’t there.

“Fine,” she whispered.

Kerry blinked, like he hadn’t expected that easy of a surrender. “…Fine?”

“Fine. Rehab. Whatever.”

The corner of his mouth twitched, this time almost a smile. “You get a chance to climb back out. He never did.”

Maybe Kerry was right. Maybe he was full of shit. Either way, she was too tired to care.

V lay there with the notebook on her lap, staring at the blank page like it was some kind of cosmic joke, and all she could think was fuck, she really was going full Silverhand. The spiral, the booze, the drugs, the refusal to quit even when every bone in her body screamed otherwise—it was textbook Johnny. Rehab? That was practically his brand too, stumbling in and out of programs, trying to scrape himself off the floor just enough to wreck himself all over again. She’d sworn she wouldn’t end up like him, sworn she’d keep her own shape and not just be a shitty echo of his, but here she was, another half-dead burnout with too much anger and not enough will to do anything but choke on it. Maybe that was the real curse he left her with. Not the biochip, not the ghost in her head, but the inevitability of becoming him. Fuck.

“Wake me up when the van comes to haul me off,” she muttered.

So she went. Did it. The rehab. White walls, too-bright lights, people talking about their “journeys” like they were all hiking the same mountain when really it was just the same pit in different disguises. She didn’t like thinking about it, so she didn’t. Mostly she just wrote in the notebook Kerry shoved into her hands, filling page after page with whatever spilled out—half-formed poems, jagged lines that could almost be songs if you squinted, and scraps of thoughts she didn’t want rattling in her skull. Turned out it did help, though she hated admitting it. She really was like Johnny, wasn’t she? Only difference was she wasn’t scribbling angry anti-corp anthems meant to burn the world down. No, hers were quieter, softer, a steady drip of grief instead of fire. She was simply sad.

A few months later Kerry had poured them both a drink, though it was just sparkling water now, all lime and fizz and none of the good stuff. Rehab rules, new rules, rules she didn’t fully hate anymore.

V knew it now, clear as day, like one of those sick jokes the universe kept playing on her—she and Kerry were codependent as hell. Funny thing, now she knew. Back when Johnny said the same about him and Kerry, she’d rolled her eyes, thought it was just Silverhand drama. But here she was, orbiting Kerry’s mansion like it was the only gravity she had left, sleeping better in his spare room than in her own overpriced penthouse. He needed her, too—that much was obvious. The two of them patched together by grief, bad habits, and the memory of the same man, clinging to each other because no one else could really understand the shape of the hole Johnny had left behind. It was pathetic. It was comforting. It was the closest thing to steady she’d had in years.

They were sprawled across his obscenely big couch in the living room. She had her notebook in her lap, chewing on the end of her pen, when he finally asked what she’d been scribbling all this time. And for reasons she couldn’t quite explain—maybe it was the way he’d been watching her with that stubborn little crease between his brows—she handed it over. Reluctantly. Like she’d just given him her liver in a paper sleeve.

He flipped through it slowly, silent at first.

“Holy shit, V,” he muttered, eyes skimming the lines. “This… this is brilliant. You know that, right? It’s—fuck—it’s like poetry, yeah? But it’s more than that. These are songs. They sound like songs.”

V smiled, tipping her head back against the couch. “Songs, huh? It’s just me whining on paper.”

He looked up at her, half-smiling, half-serious. “You’re kidding, right? This is raw. This is good. This is you. People would kill for this kind of honesty in lyrics.”

She shrugged, fiddling with the cap of her pen. “Well, if you like it so much, you can have it. Not like I know shit about music. Can’t really use the stuff myself.”

Kerry blinked, staring at her as if she’d just offered to hand over a priceless relic. “Really? You’d just… give this to me?”

“Sure,” V said with another shrug, trying to play it off casual even though her stomach was twisting. “Why not? Better you do something with it than it rots in a drawer. Consider it a freebie. Don’t say I never gave you anything.”

Kerry laughed, shaking his head like he didn’t know whether to hug her or argue. “You’re fucking unbelievable, V. Really.”

She smirked, leaning back deeper into the couch. “Yeah, tell me something I don’t know.”

They started working on the album—Kerry had insisted she’d be part of the process, no half-measures, no handing off the notebook and walking away. Full immersion. The studio became their new haunt, session musicians and sound engineers orbiting around them like satellites, all of them watching as Kerry bled her grief into verses and spun it into melody. Her words, his music. Every time the track came together, something inside her unclenched for a minute and she could breathe again.

Some days were still eaten by the rehab schedule—white room check-ins, physio that left her fingers shaking too hard to hold a pen. She wrote through the tremor anyway. Other days, the migraines came back mean and bright, shoving hot nails behind her eyes until every sound scraped. On those days, Kerry dimmed the lights, kicked everyone out and press his thumb against her temple in slow, steady circles until she could feel her heartbeat calm. He never asked her to push. He had learned the cost of that in a different lifetime.

Titles were a fight. Kerry wanted grand. She wanted small. In the end they split the difference. The album wore a name that—in V’s opinion—sounded fucking ridiculous: Ashes & Echos. The cover was a smear of chrome and rain, a streetlamp halo blown out until it looked like a star. Her name wasn’t on the front. She liked that. It meant she could walk down a street and hear her words in some stranger’s bucket speakers without having to be someone.

Everyone who heard the early cuts insisted the songs were about a hundred other people. Press previews called it a “city-breakup record,” a “love letter to decay,” an “aging rocker’s apology tour.” They weren’t wrong. They weren’t right either. Fans argued in comment feeds for days about whether some line meant addiction or devotion. V scrolled through them in Kerry’s kitchen at four a.m., eating cold noodles over the sink, and laughed until she choked.

Funny how life turned out. Once, back when it was just her and Johnny stretched out in bed, she’d asked if he’d ever write about it. She never said it outright, but he’d known—that desperate, unspoken wish to be immortalized in song, carved into something larger than life. Now it was her, not him, sitting in the studio with Kerry, writing the story in the only language she had left. To anyone else it might have sounded like a patchwork of universal truths—love, heartbreak, longing, grief. To her it was singular, simply about Johnny.

Finally, the album was finished. She held it in her hands, the final mix burned onto something tangible, and for once it felt like a victory instead of just another delay of the inevitable. And it was good—more than good, if she was being honest. It was fucking good. The kind of thing that made her laugh to herself sometimes, because how the hell had she ended up here? V, merc turned burnout turned rehab patient, now half of a duo crafting songs out of grief. At Kerry’s insistence she had broken the lease on her penthouse, the fancy mausoleum that had been more empty stage set than home. Too big for one person, too sterile for memories, too full of reminders that she’d tried so hard to outrun the pain and failed anyway.

She still kept the old megabuilding apartment though. She couldn’t quite let it go, even if it gutted her every time she stepped through the door. It was the only space that had been hers and Johnny’s, the only place where their chaos had been real, where his ghost had leaned against her kitchen counter, where his voice had tangled with her thoughts until she didn’t know where he ended and she began. It hurt like hell, but she needed to keep it, like a shrine she wasn’t ready to dismantle.

With Kerry, it was different. She had moved in without really meaning to, her things trickling into his mansion until one day there was nothing left to haul except herself. It was strange, sharing a space again, learning the rhythm of someone else’s habits, but she liked it and Kerry, for all his old rockstar dramatics, seemed to like it too. There was a steadiness to him now, something she hadn’t seen in those first frantic months when they’d been tearing themselves apart in parallel spirals. He wasn’t a deadbeat anymore. Not to his kids, not to himself, and not to her.

They were both better, somehow. Cleaner. Sober. Happier, even. They had routines, stupid domestic things like ordering takeout at midnight and arguing over whose turn it was to do laundry. Sometimes she caught herself smiling at nothing, caught him humming her lyrics under his breath, and thought maybe this was as close to peace as either of them would ever get. It wasn’t perfect—it never could be—but it was good.

For V, who had spent so long waiting for the sky to fall, good felt like a revelation.

Kerry had a habit of thumbing through her notebook whenever he was bored. V usually let him—hell, she’d practically shoved it at him that one night months back and told him to do whatever the fuck he wanted with it. So she didn’t think much of it when he was sprawled across the far end of the couch, one arm slung over the cushions, notebook resting against his chest, flipping through the pages like it was just another magazine interview about himself. She was half-watching the glow of Night City on the horizon through the window, half-dozing, until his voice cut sharp into the quiet.

“Here. Knew it was in here somewhere.”

He shoved the notebook into her face so abruptly she almost swatted it out of his hand. The pen lines glared up at her, her own messy scrawl made foreign by how intently he was looking at it. He jabbed at the page with his finger, his voice rasping out, roughened from whiskey and too many decades of screaming on stage.

“This,” Kerry said, like he’d discovered a lost holy scripture, “is a fucking masterpiece. And what a shame I can’t put it on the goddamn album.”

V blinked at him, scoffed, and leaned back into the couch like it was nothing. “So don’t. Use it on your next single. You’re the bigshot, right? Figure it out.”

He made a sound halfway between a groan and a laugh, exasperation clawing through. “Jesus, V. No. I can’t. How the fuck could I—do you even read your own shit back after you write it? Huh?”

“Not really,” she muttered, though the heat was creeping up her neck.

He leaned closer, notebook nearly jammed against her nose again, and started reading off like he was testifying in court. “‘Crying with lip gloss on. Playing with myself. Tasting like cherry. Only one that fucks me right.’” His eyes flicked up over the rim of the page, locking with hers. “C’mon. You see the problem here?”

V stared at him, deadpan. “The problem is you’re too much of a coward to sing it.”

“Coward?!” His voice cracked incredulously, and she almost laughed. “The problem is—look at me, V. I’m pushing fucking ninety. You want me out there crooning about lip gloss and cherries? Everyone would laugh me off the stage. It’s not me. It’s—” He exhaled hard, shaking his head. “It’s you. It’s all you. Too girlish, too… V. Won’t work.”

“Then don’t sing it,” she said flatly, reaching for the notebook, but he yanked it back out of reach like a child guarding his favorite toy.

“No. Not letting this rot in some drawer just ‘cause you’re too chicken to own it.” His voice dropped a little, less rasp, more insistence. “I want you to record it. Not at the studio. At home. Just you and me. No execs, no suits breathing down our necks. Raw.”

She barked out a laugh, incredulous. “Oh, sure, Kerry. Let’s record a little bedroom demo about me touching myself. Sounds real professional.”

He smirked, finally tossing the notebook onto the coffee table but keeping his eyes pinned on her. “Professional’s overrated. Music’s supposed to be dirty, remember? Honest. You wrote this. Feels too fucking real to let it gather dust. And I’m telling you—I’m not the one meant to sing it. You are.”

V shifted on the couch, uncomfortable with the way he was looking at her. “You’re insane. I don’t sing.”

“You write like you do,” Kerry countered immediately, as if he’d been waiting to spring the argument. “And that’s half the battle. Don’t tell me you can’t. Hell, you’ve got more voice than half the autotuned corpos they’re pushing as talent these days. Don’t need polished. Just need you.”

She rolled her eyes, trying to force the weight of his words off her chest. “You’re relentless, you know that?”

“Yeah,” he said, a grin pulling sharp across his face. “And I’m right.”

The silence after that was heavy, settling into the space between them. She thought about it. About how Johnny would’ve laughed himself sick at the idea of her singing about lip gloss and cherries and all the shit she never said out loud but bled into paper. About how he would’ve told her to scream it into a mic anyway.

She reached for the notebook, flipping it shut before she could change her mind. “Fine. We’ll try. But if it sucks—”

“It won’t,” Kerry cut in immediately, leaning back with that smug old grin that said he knew he’d already won.

“—if it sucks, I’m burying this and you in the backyard,” she finished, glaring.

He laughed, big and genuine, head tipping back. “Deal.”

And that was that. Her song. Her voice. No studio gloss, no corporate bullshit. Just her and Kerry, late at night, turning sadness into sound. For the first time in too long, she wasn’t afraid of how it might feel.

The night unfolded the way good nights sometimes did—by accident, without any grand plan or intention. Kerry had his bass strapped low, leaning into it, coaxing out a line that was deceptively simple, a heartbeat that filled the room like it had always been meant to be there. Just steady rhythm, clean and honest, pulsing in a way that immediately stuck in V’s chest. She didn’t need to say anything to know this was it—that foundation on which the rest of the track would stand.

Then he switched to drums, nothing wild, just a clean beat to give the bass somewhere to breathe. V sat cross-legged on the couch, knees tucked under the hem of her shirt, tapping along absentmindedly as he found the right groove. There was something almost funny about it—rock legend Kerry Eurodyne, banging out a rhythm simple enough you could mistake it for amateur practice, except it wasn’t. It was restraint, polish, the kind of thing you only pulled off after years of overindulging in every excess and finally learning that less could be more. She smiled at that thought and didn’t tell him.

The guitar came after—soft strums, then sharper chords, layered over the rhythm like color bleeding into black-and-white. Dreamy, indie pop-rock, exactly the kind of sound that crept up on you until you realized you’d been humming it for hours. He kept it airy, let the chords breathe instead of crashing them down. It gave the whole thing that strange, hazy texture that felt almost too intimate for words.

Her voice surprised even her—it was calm, even, steady, not the cracked mess she half-expected after everything. The words floated through the track, threading themselves into Kerry’s bassline, not fighting it, not dominating it. Just… there. She kept her eyes closed most of the time, because she didn’t want to see Kerry’s reaction yet, didn’t want to read too much into the way he looked at her when she sang words she’d once only written for herself.

The hours melted away as they worked, piecing together a song that seemed to build itself. Just them. V shuffled around barefoot, tee slipping off one shoulder, hair a mess, not giving a damn. Kerry was the same—bare-chested in old sweatpants, sprawled on the floor with his guitar, laughing when he missed a beat, muttering curses when the recording tech glitched, then grinning when they caught a perfect take.

There was a point—maybe halfway through the night—where it stopped being work at all. They were just dancing around the sound. Kerry slid over, guitar still hanging from his shoulder, looping an arm around her neck and pulling her into his chest while she sang into the mic. His hand drummed idly against her collarbone in time with the beat, and she leaned back into him, laughing through the next line.

They swayed together, barefoot on the polished floor, voices blending into laughter, into humming, into nonsense words when she forgot a line and had to make something up. They didn’t stop to think too hard. Just let it happen, the two of them pulled along by the momentum of something that felt light for once.

By the time dawn pressed pale light through the blinds, the track was there—whole, breathing, alive. They sat cross-legged on the rug, surrounded by scattered lyric sheets, instruments propped against walls. V leaned her head back against the couch, hair sticking to the back of her neck, and listened to the playback while Kerry fiddled with the mix. Her voice floated out soft and certain, wrapped in the simple rhythm of his bass and the dreamy haze of guitar.

Kerry was sprawled sideways in the armchair, still shirtless, a cigarette dangling from his lips though he hadn’t lit it. He tapped his foot to the song, nodded once, and then said, almost offhand but with that razor edge of conviction: “V… this thing’s a fucking masterpiece.”

She exhaled, slow and measured, staring down at her knees drawn tight against her chest. She didn’t look at him. If she did, she’d see his face and maybe believe him, and that was the problem.

“You can keep saying it,” she muttered, “but it’s not going out there.”

Kerry leaned forward, resting his elbows on his thighs, cigarette rolling between his fingers. “C’mon, you can’t seriously tell me you’re gonna bury this. People need to hear it.”

“No,” she said, sharper now, lifting her gaze to him with that iron she sometimes had to put in her voice just to keep from folding. “Not now. Maybe not ever.”

His jaw tightened like he wanted to argue more, but he studied her for a long moment, then sighed and leaned back again, dragging his hand through his hair. “Fine. Your call. Still a fucking masterpiece, though.”

She almost laughed at that, but it came out as more of a bitter huff. A masterpiece. Right. It was just too close. Too raw. She hadn’t written it for stages or fans or screaming crowds. She hadn’t even written it for Kerry, not really. She’d written it the way you sometimes scribbled something down in the middle of the night just to get it out before it burned a hole through you.

Putting it out there would mean handing the world a piece of herself she hadn’t figured out how to protect yet. Those lyrics—the weight of longing dressed up in pretty words—were hers. Her grief, her memories, her phantom love story with a ghost that no one else would ever really understand. She could imagine it, faceless crowds belting the chorus back at her like it was some catchy pop hook, stripped of all its blood, turned into noise.

She shook her head, almost imperceptibly, and hugged her knees tighter. Too intimate. Too naked. Maybe someday she’d grow into the kind of person who could stand hearing strangers sing her pain back at her. Maybe someday she’d even want it. Today, it was enough that Kerry knew, that someone else had heard it and called it brilliant.

V sank into the low leather chair by the corner window, the city sprawling below like a circuit board drenched in neon and rain. The album was out, a brilliant mosaic of sorrow and lust and longing, and the listening party had felt like a gauntlet she had to survive just to keep appearances.

It was hell disguised as glamour. Everywhere she turned, there were trays of champagne flutes fizzing like temptation, lines of glittering powder laid out in bathroom stalls, the air thick with perfume and smoke and the kind of laughter that only came easy when you were fucked up. Staying sober in that sea of indulgence felt like holding her breath underwater. Her fingers itched, her throat burned, and she couldn’t decide which was worse: the cravings clawing at her insides or the shame of knowing how easy it would be to give in. It was supposed to be a celebration, but for her it was survival, every second dragging like an eternity, every smile she forced on her face brittle as glass.

Kerry had insisted she come, dragged her along, made sure she looked like someone who belonged in the glow of cameras, but the moment she was seen, the mask cracked. She had slipped away, heels clicking against the polished floors, and refused to go to Kerry’s, knowing the opulence would only mock the emptiness she carried inside.

The old megabuilding apartment called to her like a siren. It was where memories of Johnny lingered in the edges of shadows, where she could sit and remember the feel of his lean against her, the rough brush of his beard on her neck, the way he could take the world’s chaos and make it hers for a moment. The nostalgia lodged in her chest like a heavy stone, constant and unyielding. Sitting there in the dim light, heels still on, dress slightly wrinkled from the night, she let herself feel it—the sickness, the ache, the unrelenting echo of what she had lost.

She knew she would never be cured of the Silverhand’s sickness. It wasn’t just grief or heartbreak; it was embedded into the marrow of her bones, the neural lace of her memory, the sharp, insistent thrum of a ghost that refused to leave her.

The apartment was almost empty. A few remnants of another life cluttered the edges—a book she hadn’t touched in months, a photograph of her and Jackie from some reckless night she’d only half-remembered—but otherwise it was bare, echoing with the ghosts of laughter and arguments and whispered promises.

She couldn’t tell how long she sat like that. Minutes? Hours? Time had lost meaning. The lights of the city flickered, rain streaking down the glass like rivulets of memories she couldn’t scrub away. Her mind wandered to the album, the songs she’d written, the verses she had poured into the music as if bleeding on paper could substitute for bleeding out inside. She thought of Kerry’s face, patient and indulgent, of the way he had insisted she write, coaxed her back from the edge, held her in his arms when she had nothing left to give. And yet, even with all that, the hollow ache of Johnny’s absence stretched like a canyon through her chest. She missed him with a precision that was cruel and constant.

The stillness was broken by a faint ping at the door. She didn’t move immediately, half-expecting it to be another delivery drone, a neighbor, someone who shouldn’t be here. The sound persisted, deliberate, insistent. She rose, her body stiff from hours in the chair, heels clicking softly against the worn tiles as she moved. The city’s lights pooled on the walls, casting long, strange shadows.

She heard the code being punched in, precise and familiar. The door swished open without hesitation.

Johnny Silverhand was standing in her doorway.