Chapter Text
V is chewing on synth jerky when she catches it in the corner of her Kiroshi’s. A practically ancient acoustic guitar resting against the wall of her apartment. She had picked it up during a gig the previous week, only because Johnny wouldn’t stop nagging her about it.
“Don’t wanna lug it back home,”
“V it’s a free set of strings, c’mon,” She looked over the guitar, covered in chipped black paint and faded stickers.
“Looks like it’ll crumble if you touch it,” Johnny gave her a hard stare.
“V, I wouldn’t ask ya’ to pick up some piece of junk, look—“ She filtered out his technical rant about guitar parts as she continued to scroll through data files.
“I don’t even play,” V sighed, “So why do I need it?”
“First off, not about need—”
“If you’re about to say something like, it’s about letting your soul scream, I’m going to barf,”
“— Second, I play,” She jacked out of the computer before turning to Johnny, lounging obnoxiously in an office chair as he glitched in and out of her vision. Guilt washed over her. V had a bad habit of forgetting that Johnny’s a person too, not just a passenger.
“Hey V,” She lowered her voice with a drawl. Johnny shook his head, “Please get me that guitar so I can play,” He gave her an enthusiastic thumbs up at that, to which V just looked at him expectantly. His shoulders slouched.
“Hey V, please get me that guitar so I can play,” He repeated flatly. V walked over and picked the instrument up by its neck, not trusting the strap with loose threads latched to it.
”See how a little kindness can take you a long way?”
“Fuck you,” Johnny said with little malice, “Thanks,”
“Mhm. C’mon let’s delta,”
V tosses the wrapper in the trash before going back to pick the guitar up. She takes a seat on the couch, positioning it in her lap. Her hands slide to the right placements. Curiously, she strums it, unsurprisingly finding it out of tune. V frowns before twisting some pegs with ease and strums again. Like magic, it’s fixed. She places her fingers down on the strings and begins to pluck, finding it somewhat difficult to do with her nails. Still, she finds a tune and begins to mouth the words as she goes. Then, song. A weak, high pitched melody as she keeps her voice small.
“Got a bad feelin’ that I need to feel, black dog runs at my side, down a road no end in—”
“Whatcha doin’?” V jumps as Johnny appears at her side.
“Fucking christ, Johnny!” She loosens her panicked grip on the guitar. “Dude!”
“Didn’t mean to scare ya’,” He says with a snort. She swipes her hand to the side to slap him, of course it does nothing but pass through. V huffs before putting the guitar down. “You were doin’ good, thought you said you don’t know how to play?”
“I…” She pauses, looking to the guitar then her hands, “I don’t,”
“You sure?”
“Yeah I just… I picked it up and I knew,” Between this and the recent coughing fits and bloody noses, she understands.
”Shit,”
“Yeah,” She says bitterly. Sometimes she wishes she could go a single day without the reminder that she is dying, a word she stopped using a while ago. Dying would be the easiest equivalent to help an outsider understand, being rewritten is the reality of it. “Pretty neat though, that it’s like a part of your soul,” Johnny doesn’t seem to find that uplifting. “How long have you been playing?”
If V really wanted to try, she wouldn’t need to ask. She could dig back through his mind, but those memories would be layered on top of her own, bleeding into each other. Makes it hard to discern whose life those moments really belong to.
“Must’ve been nine?” She notices the lack of shades and, surprisingly, lack of a cig hanging out of his mouth. “Bought it off some nomads passin’ through with all the scratch I’d earned from cuttin’ yards that summer,” She didn’t expect him to continue. V can hardly picture Johnny Silverhand mowing yards in the middle of bum fuck nowhere Texas. She can see the day he got the guitar almost crystal clear. Memories that didn’t belong to her popping up had freaked her out at first, now it was somewhat relaxing. Like starting to dream when she’d close her eyes after a long day, not quite awake but not asleep. “Had to hide it under my bed ‘cause my father thought that ‘music shit’ was ‘gay’,” He goes quiet, and she figures he’s done sharing.
“My mom wanted me to play something, when I was seven she signed me up for piano, then violin at eight, cello at nine,”
“That bad?” She shakes her head.
“Bored. Bored out of my mind. Thing about my mom is she always wanted me to do what she would want to do. So only classy instruments,” V sits back, letting the guitar go as it leans against the couch. “Thing about me is, I wanted to sing and play the guitar, just like all the rockerboy music Dad listened to,” She smiles fondly, “And my mom hated that, said that kind of ‘trash’ was beneath us. Couldn’t stand the sound of my voice too,” Her smile falls, “So I never tried to learn,”
For V, music had been a hobby forced upon her, a tried and failed attempt for praise and a spot of pride in her mother’s heart. For Johnny, music was survival. She recalls meals, gas, and rent paid with eddies earned at gigs— dark nights in barracks with a flashlight shone onto a page of hastily scribbled lyrics, strings humming through guilt and grief at some hole in the wall dive in Night City.
“Your voice ain’t that bad,” Johnny says after a few minutes where V starts to wonder if he can tell when she sees inside his mind.
“It’s pretty bad,” She insists. He shakes his head in an exasperated manner.
“It ain’t, you’re just singin’ wrong,” She waits for an explanation that never comes.
“How can someone sing wrong? You just sing… right?” Johnny sighs at that.
“You’re bringing your voice up too high, tryin’ to make it something it’s not. Makes you sound like a dying cat,” V glares.
“You just said—“ He puts a hand up to silence her.
“Let it rest where it’s at, waste less breath that way and you’ll sound just fine,” She breathes out her nose, looking to the guitar and back to find him still there, staring expectantly.
“What?” He gestures to the guitar. “I am not singing for you,”
“You just were,”
“That’s different,”
“It’s really not, but besides that you’re right,” He stands, pacing to the other wall of the cramped room, “you’re not singin’ for me,” Johnny reminds her before glitching out of sight. V sighs, begrudgingly setting the guitar in her lap once more. The chords come naturally, her voice less so. She chooses a different song and goes through the same verse again and again until her throat no longer feels tight. The song comes with a low ghostly sound to it, a sound that reminds her of the rockergirls on the radio when she was little. Her voice is scratchy and smooth at all the right parts. She cracks a small smile near the end.