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ho-of-babylon · 2 days ago

Text

in half, in half

Johnny and Valentine are becoming closer than ever and they're bound for a little fun on the town, which goes exactly about as well as you think it would for two idiots trying to ignore all their problems via a little risk-seeking behavior. Written originally for the WOTNC song prompt which for this round was Dilaudid by the Mountain Goats. (try giving it a listen while you read)

content warning: dysphoria (cut with some euphoria), drug use, semi-public sex

~2000 words

“Is this really necessary?” V’s voice is slurred, her half of their shared mind still foggy with the effects of the the pill she’d tried to take to wrest back control. Serves her right to suffer the backlash. “I already look like shit.”

Johnny rubs the dark eyeshadow between her thumb and forefinger, struggling for a few moments to raise her hand, the muscles of her bicep twitching as they fight. He leans forward on her other hand, glaring at her in the mirror, which admittedly is somewhat difficult to do when they share the same face. They do look like shit, worn down to the dregs, with sickly half-moons under the eyes and lank, grimy hair. One week critical bed rest and three weeks of frantic suicidal desperation have made a guttering candle out of what once had been a brilliant, spitting firework. Still–

“That’s what I’m trying to cover up,” he says, with waning patience for her theatrics. “Now get off your high horse, princess.”

“I don’t wear makeup,” V growls, her ironclad stubbornness rising on cue.

“It’s not that kind of makeup.” He switches tactics. “Which of us was the one drowning in pussy, huh? You really think you were the one reeling those poor saps in? All they saw were the dollar signs on Abernathy’s high-priced–“

“Too bad all you had going for you were those big baby browns and a disappointing tequila dick,” V hisses, before he can finish the thought. Her scowl fights with his grin, and loses in a pitched battle that makes them look almost half as insane as they actually are.

“Contain your jealousy,” he soothes indulgently, and feels her flounce into the background of his awareness, sulking just like Kerry used to. “You should be so lucky to have someone like me to show you how it’s done.”

Her only response is a guttural laugh, rolling over his tongue in a way that melds perfectly into his snicker. He raises a hand and she does not fight as he begins spreading the eyeshadow in thick streaks over one eye with the pad of her finger, covering the sickly reddish hue with a greasy dark purple. He spreads it generously over the lid and into the hollows of her brow. V watches from behind her own eyes, as haughty and focused like a cat sitting with its tail tucked around its paws. Johnny can all but feel the irritated flick of the tip back and forth as he works.

She says nothing when he’s finished, but as he’s admiring his work his satisfaction is tinged with her begrudging appreciation. Johnny follows the eyeshadow with a thick liner on the top lid, which he manages not to fuck up even when her hand tremors. Her limp, fine hair he slicks back tight against her skull with gel, finishing her transformation from drowned rat to bedraggled villain, which is as much as anyone could do. It looks better on her than it ever did on him, with her cold gray eyes and corpo bitch expression.

If only the rest of her were so easy to flatter. The collared shirt he’s thrown on is surprisingly soft, but the thin material adds barely anything to her starved shoulders, and does little to conceal the thin, weak muscles of her upper arm. V’s mirrored dissatisfaction lessens slightly, though, as she unbuttons the cuff on one wrist and rolls it up to secure in place above the elbow, revealing scraped and bruised forearms that nevertheless give her a burst of contentment to see laid bare.

“Can’t help putting your dick on display,” he tells her, earning another round of choked, giddy mirth that cuts through her teeth. She wiggles her fingers, admiring her own oversized brawler’s mitts before securing the other sleeve. “God only knows what kind of output you attract.”

“You’ll soon be lucky enough to find out,” she replies. “Although usually I’m not dressed like a twenties dud.”

“Off by about two decades there, whippersnapper,” he tells her, and she rolls her eyes.

“Straight from the naught-ies” she corrects, and then they both chuckle, which is a strange, stuttering affair that eventually coalesces into a smile which twitches only slightly at the edges. Johnny reaches for the box at the edge of the sink, and V groans. “No rings.”

-0-

In the end they compromise on four rings and two bracelets– one of which has studs in it that Johnny had assumed were decorative but in fact give off little pulses of radio static. Those pulses resonate in V’s specially tuned chrome at frequencies that occasionally send trills of pleasure down the back of her neck. They also wear the bullet, picked out of the web Misty had made by idle fingers, and now drilled and restrung on its chain courtesy of the BD editor that V still refuses to text back.

“I look like a douche,” she mutters, running a hand over her gelled hair self-consciously, as though she hasn’t been staring at herself in every reflective surface on their way here. It’s dark enough in this bar that her eyes have automatically swapped to the soothing dark blue monochrome of her lowlight vision, and more than half the eyes flashing in the sea of people around them seem to have the same capability.

Johnny doesn’t respond, occupied by the task of weaving through the crowd towards the bar, letting the noise and smoke wash over him in familiar waves. It’s still strange, being anonymous in a way he hasn’t been for years. He waves the bartender down while V does something to her chrome that dulls the beat and pulse of network interfaces around them into something more manageable.

He orders bourbon, which makes V suspicious– as she always is of any olive branch, though really the order had just rolled off her tongue. While they wait he scans the faces down the bar and finds naught of interest until he’s about to turn out to the rest of the room and by chance locks his gaze with a dark-eyed woman who looks like the good kind of trouble. She holds eye contact for a few seconds in acknowledgement, and then looks away, sending a rush of hormones straight to V’s gonk brain.

<Relax,> he tells her. <Nothing scares a chick off more than getting too worked up.>

<Drop dead.> She picks up the bourbon before the bartender has even let it go, and starts the tab with a flick of her wrist. <I'm not drunk enough to be your wingman yet.>

Later, they’re in the bathroom of a different bar, two fingers deep in some wiry, chromed-up wildcat who’s sucking on their neck like it’s a lifeline. Booze and stims and the fading end of a nicotine rush have left Johnny and V mixed up like a load in the washing machine, complete with the wet thudding rhythm of their heart beneath aching, flexing ribs. Control comes in flashes, but it feels mostly like neither of them are even at the wheel, propelled into motion by a force outside comprehension. The Devil, maybe. V’s Hand moves tirelessly, relentlessly, her mind so focused on making her output shake apart Johnny is half-convinced he will too, except–

–they’re leaned over a sink so far their forehead is knocking the mirror, flying on something that has V’s pupils blown wide open. Their world is reduced to one all-seeing eye and its orbiting cyberware, and the steady, heady pulse of pleasure between their legs. One of the smears of color in the mirror must be the owner of the lasciviously full cock at work. Johnny lays a hand on the mirror to double it, palms flat together, face to face–

–with the shifting white noise of a crowd, feeling the fever pitch of anticipation like an orgasmic shiver, realizing almost too late the movement back and to the left is a punch until instinct and a insensate calm lets them drift underneath the hook and pop back up with several knuckles to the chin of their opponent. With a little more muscle it might have been a knockout. With a little more heart it might have earned them freedom from consequence, but the feather wins, the heart falls short, they falter at the last step as the crowd jeers and whoops at every hammer-like blow until their soft head hits the ground with a jolt–

–upright from the headrest into a familiar howling pain where his nose should be and a headache so deep it must pierce straight through the back of V’s skull, ten times worse than the prick where Rogue pulls the hypo from their leg. She tosses it down in the center console and picks up another, jamming it into the skin nearby with alarming precision, considering her eyes haven’t left the road. Consciousness is bad enough, but the sharpening lucidity is worse than torture, like granting sapience to a bug that has already been crushed under foot. They loll and groan and sputter, spasming with adrenaline and blood-spattered misery.

“Think you might have misunderstood the concept of lying low,” Rogue lectures, threading her bull-headed tank of a car between two boxy shitheaps. V recognizes Northside. Johnny’s memories are a little more nebulous, shuddering like a collapsed lung.

“Fuck you,” V says, because V has always been jealous of Rogue. V hates everyone who ever gave a shit about Johnny, because she’s a huge bitch. And because she’s jealous. Her voice falters into a pathetic cough. “Fuck you, fuck you.”

“Don’t kick off yet,” Rogue says, without blinking an eye. “And don’t vomit in my car.”

Johnny’s not particularly of the mind to take orders from Rogue, but agony always grounds V in a way that gives her an edge and she rolls down the window and sulks against the door, letting the humid breeze ruffle her drenched hair and settle the riot in her stomach. He wipes their bloody mouth and lifts his hand to see the bruised and busted mess he’s made of the knuckles of her left hand. She raises the right, which looks at least as bad, and spends most of the ride prying the rings off her swollen fingers before tossing them out the window.

Vik doesn’t look happy to see them, Rogue’s head in their armpit the only thing keeping them from kissing the floor. He says a lot of shit that Johnny lets flow over him and which V stolidly ignores, swallowing blood and thinking of some memory that smells like sandalwood and tea. But whatever his beef is, it doesn’t stop him from helping her down into the chair and hitting her with something along the gumline that hurts like hell and then makes the screaming agony melt into a murmur of discontent.

“Best I can do for you right now,” he says gruffly, when he’s finished poking and prodding and setting. “Your body needs some rest to knit itself back together. Apart from that–“

“How do I look?” V interrupts, because the old man is refusing to look her in the eye. Johnny adds, “Lemme see.”

Vik pops the mirror out from the chair and slides it into position all without ever looking in their direction. When he’s finished he kicks back to his desk, back turned, after exchanging a look with Rogue, whose expression remains as maddeningly neutral as always. Johnny reaches to adjust the mirror, and then pauses as they stare at each other in the mirror.

The eyeshadow has smeared and blurred into the hollows of their burning eyes, the swelling on their lips and cheek enough to bring livid color to their death mask without looking like a botched lift. The doc missed a little of the blood crusted into their nostrils, but underneath that, their smile slides free and untethered like a living thing. Her nose is red and puffy and a little crooked. They look like a fucking million eds. They look like thinly scraped shit. They’re going to live forever.

Johnny tugs the mirror closer and V props herself up and kisses her reflection.

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