@cyberpawn said: "Hey Johnny?" Their voice is gentle, deliberate as they tried to think through their words before speaking, not caring if Johnny would know their thoughts before they were said. "I'm sorry if I ever made you feel like a fuckin', uh, freak in our body. I know it's not fair 'cause this isn't your fault. This life is, uh, it's our's. And I want to make it a good one. I promise I won't make you feel like that ever again, choom."
When first waking up in Vale’s body, the fact it wasn’t his hadn’t crossed his mind. The realization hadn’t hit him, not until after making some semblance of amends at the diner. V was much shorter than him, both hands unlike his own. But he had never felt like a freak; always just out of reach, suspended sensations. At first as if the body didn’t want him, rejecting him, fighting against the machinery within the relic that forced Vale to transform into an empty vessel fit to contain a long-dead rockerboy that didn’t deserve it. The apologetic nature comes through before the words do, like seeing lights through a fog before making out it’s an oncoming car on the road. Johnny keeps his gaze away from them head turned with his knee bouncing. It all betrays the notion that he isn’t really there.
“Never did. Not like it’s your fault either . . .” he manages to respond a little all too melancholic. The situation was less than preem, a bit fucked up even, that Vale was no longer ever, truly, alone. But some part of Johnny felt as if they liked the company, and so did he. It was nice to be in the head of a petty merc rather than some fucking corpo drilling him for facts. What a selfish thought, he tells himself, to force someone out of their partial autonomy just to be a little less lonely. “I kind of like the sound of that, though,” comes after contemplative thought, nodding his head and still avoiding eye contact, as if he still has trouble confronting the fact himself. “Our body. Even if it was mostly yours to begin with, really . . . Sorry about that, V. But of all the heads I could’ve ended up in, I got hardly any complaints being in this one.”
Then does he cheer up a bit, facing Vale with a bittersweet smile. There’s a feeling in his stomach, a little pit of apology; they're starting to blur a bit too much, the line between V and Johnny. He wants to say sorry. He wants to say I ain't got the right. Because, really, when does he ever? It was never his body to begin with, and yet now as he sits across from them in their shared psyche, he's never felt more at home with it. Vale is built of proportions that he's not supposed to fit in, and yet when he wakes in the morning and feels their thoughts stir, he always thinks to himself: man, I would never choose to get stuck with anybody else.
"You don't gotta apologize. For anything." A lesser man would say it was the desperation of being stuck in Mikoshi. A lesser man would tell Vale yeah, I'm freaked out being outside of my own body. But this was one of the rarer instances where Johnny was being genuine. He took his sunglasses, staring into their metaphysical reflections. He can't even remember what it's like to be in his body anymore... but he doesn't find that he misses it all too much. Maybe he should be freaked out by that ( but even then: being stuck with V, shared body and mind, didn't sound half bad at all ). "Thanks. For letting me stay."
It wasn't like V had much of a choice. But he could feel it, deep down; if they could, they'd let him stay forever. And that sounded pretty nice.
