your branch and origin/main have diverged

She’d tried to slither away when he wasn’t watching. Crawling on her belly back to the viper pit. For what? The man who’d gotten her soul split in two and had been too proud to touch her.

“Hey.” Kerry catches him by surprise, crossing the cold tile and putting his hands around Johnny’s hips, familiar calluses skating across his skin. His voice is low, graveled by fatigue. “Can’t sleep?”

“V’s up,” he says. He turns on the faucet and brings a handful of water to his mouth to wash out some of the fuzziness. That just makes him aware of how thirsty he is, so he bends and drinks straight from the stream until it makes him start to feel sick.

Kerry’s hand is running up and down his spine. “She okay?”

“She’s fine.”

Kerry’s silent for a while, but Johnny’s not in a hurry to rush him so long as he’s combing his fingers through the hair plastered to the back of his neck. “You okay?”

Johnny opens his mouth to answer, watching the face in the mirror. It’s all wrong. He should have gone to Kerry sooner, should have let Alt pack him away until they could grow him a clone body. It’s V’s fault he rushed things, and now he’s stuck like this, in this body. He should have killed that old dog when he had the chance. He should kill him now.

“Johnny,” Kerry says, turning him around so his back is to the sink. “Hey,” he says, a little quieter, cupping Johnny’s face. Fifty years he’s been dead, and Kerry still wants him. Fifty years and all his bullshit, and Kerry is cradling his face like he’s someone who had been worth waiting for. “You still with me?”

“What kind of question is that?” Johnny asks, and the words come out an accusation. He exhales, gripping the counter so his knuckles go white and numb.

Kerry’s staring at him with that look on his face that makes him old. Rogue has it too, sometimes, when she’s looking at him. Like there’s something they know that he doesn’t, just because they sold out. Like they pity him because he’s got the guts to do what they won’t.

“You’re high, Johnny.”

“So what?” He brushes off Kerry’s hold because he can’t feel those hands right now without thinking of V at his back, her breath on his neck while she watches. It’s all a fucking lie, and he’s clinging too tightly to something he never deserved, like a ghost that can’t move on. “What the hell do you care?”

Something flips like a switch in Kerry. He shoves Johnny back, crowding him so the stone of the countertop is digging uncomfortably into his thighs. “I don’t know, Johnny, why the hell do I care? Is it just some giant fucking mystery to you? Are you that stupid?”

This time instead of waiting for an answer, Kerry yanks him down by the dogtags into a kiss. Johnny falls apart, sliced and portioned into raw hunger. The kiss turns bloody, but Kerry doesn’t complain like he usually does when he breaks skin. His grip on Johnny’s shoulders is so tight it’s painful, but it feels good to be needed. It settles the itch in his skin, makes his hands strong and sure.

He picks Kerry up by the hips and turns to set him down on the counter, following the driving bass line he’s setting down, the foundation over which he can spark and soar. His mind slips away while he’s still chasing Kerry’s mouth, flickering back when he sees his face in the mirror, arched while Kerry scrapes his teeth over his neck.

It's just some stranger. A dead man. Frankenstein, hollowed out by his own monster.

“Johnny,” Kerry is saying, insistently. His eyes are so blue, even in the dim light. He still smells the same, still tastes the same, but he’s not the same.