Chapter Text
V wakes up to silence.
Not the city. Night City never shuts up. Sirens bleed through the walls, a baseline pulses somewhere three blocks over. The pipes in the building knock like theyre arguing with themselves.
Its the other silence that is offputting.
The one inside his skull.
For a week, theres been a constant edge to this thoughts. Not loud, and not always talking. Just… there. A presence leaning against the inside of his head like it owns the place. Johnny.
Now its gone.
V stares at the ceiling.
Waits.
Nothing.
No dry commentary about the peeling paint. No phantom cigarette smell that doesnt belong to him.
No sense of someone standing just beside him.
His stomach drops before logic catches up.
“Johnny,” he says, voice rough from sleep.
The name feels stupid in the empty room.
No answer.
He pushes himself upright.
The world tilts half a degree too far– vertigo.
His left hand misses the edge of the mattress. Motor delay. Its small but wrong. His vision stutters– a faint digital smear at the edge of his optics, like a frame dropped out of sequence.
He freezes.
Breathing steady, heart rate elevated but not spiking. No pain.
He swings his legs over the side of the bed and stands. Or tries to.
The floor shifts under him.
Not physically but mentally. The signal arrives late, like his brain is buffering inside his own body.
“Johnny.”
Still nothing.
A thin static crawls along the base of his skull. Not the usual background noise. Sharper– searching.
V moves toward the bathroom on instinct, one hand braced against the wall. The mirror catches him mid-step– pupils blown wider than they should be in the low light.
He grips the sink.
For a split second, his reflection doesnt track.
His head turns. The image lags a fraction behind.
Then–
White.
Not blindness. Just a harsh flash across his vision like a camera shudder.
His knees buckle.
He catches himself on the counter, teeth clicking together.
In the wash of the afterimage, something overlays his optics. Too fast to process fully. Clean lines. Corporate geometry. A watermark ghosting across his field of vision before collapsing into static.
Araska architecture.
Gone.
The bathroom light flickers once.
And Johnny slams back into existence.
“What the–”
The voice hits like a dropped weight.
Not in the room, but in him.
V’s breathing evens out almost immediately. The motor lag smooths. The world settles back into alignment like someone corrected everything.
Johnny materlizes in the mirror behind him, hands braced on the sink he can’t fully touch.
“You feel that?” Johnny demands.
V swallows and nods once before remembering. Johnny doesnt need to see it.
“Yeah.”
“The hell was that?”
“You disappeared.”
Johnny’s jaw tightens. “No, I didnt.”
“You werent there.”
“I was.” A beat. “I think.”
V straightens slowly, tests his balance. Solid now.
“That wasnt a spike,” he says. “That was external.”
Johnny goes still in a way that has nothing to do with projection. The performance drops.
“You see it too?” Johnny asks.
“Arasaka sig. For a second.”
Silence stretches between them, not empty, but calculating.
Johnny steps closer, close enough that V’s brain fills in the proximity it doesnt actually feel.
“Run it back,” Johnny says.
V closes his eyes and pulls up the shard log overlay. Background processes scroll past in dim blue text. System diagnostics. Neural mapping orutines. Relic integration metrics.
There.
A microsecond anomaly.
Encrypted handshake. No originating address. Architecture signature buried under three layers of masking but the bones are familiar.
Arasaka doesnt change its spine.
“Pinged us,” V says quietly.
Johnny’s expression flattens into something colder than anger.
“Scan?” he asks.
“Looks like it.”
“From where?”
“Doesnt say.”
Johnny laughs once, but theres no humor in it.
“Course it doesnt.”
V scrolls deeper. The anomaly is already decaying in the logs, overwritten by routine system activity. Whoever did it knew how to make it quiet.
“They were probing the chip,” V says.
Johnnys gaze sharpens. “Not you.”
“No.”
Not his optics. Not his Kiroshis. Not his neuralware suite.
The Relic.
Johnny palaces once through the narrow bathroom space, boots making no sound on the tile that isnt interacting with him.
“I didnt go anywhere,” Johnny says finally. “It felt like–” he stops, recallibrates. “Like something cut the feed. Briefly.”
V studies his own reflection again. Pupils stablizing, no tremors now.
“When you came back,” V says, “it stopped.”
Johnny looks at him.
“What stopped.”
“The lag.”
It hangs there.
Neither of them fills the space with what it implies.
Johnny folds his arms. The motion is sharp, irritated.
“They shouldnt even know youre alive,” he says. “Not officially.”
“They dont.” V exits the log overlay. The bathroom feels smaller than it did five minutes ago. “Which means someones running a quiet project.”
“Or someone noticed something.”
V meets Johnnys eyes in the mirror.
“Like what.”
Johnny doesnt answer immediately.
For a week, theyve been operating under one assumption: the Relic is killing V. Slow overwrite. Inevitable deterioration.
But the last few days havent followed the projected decline.
V hasnt blacked out. Hasnt seizure. Hasnt lost time beyond the intial truama. No need to use omega blockers.
The integration package hasnt climbed at expected speed.
V knows this because he checks it.
Johnny knows because he feels it.
“Like youre not dropping as fast as you should be,” Johnny says.
The words land heavy, clinical.
V turns off the bathroom light.
The apartment feels different now. Smaller. Exposed.
He walks to the window and parts the blinds just enough to see the street below. Same cracked pavement. Same food cart on the corner, same flickering holo-ads promising chrome and salvation.
Nothing looks like a surveillance team.
That doesnt mean anything.
“They found us,” Johnny says.
Not dramatic. Not loud. Just flat.
V lets the blinds fall back into place.
“Then theyll try again,” he says.
Johnnys gaze drags toward him.
“Youre not scared.”
V shrugs once.
“Of what.”
“Arasaka.”
V turns away from the window.
“They already killed you,” he says. “Im still here.”
Johnny watches him for a long second.
The quiet inside Vs skull no longer feels empty.
It feels occupied again.
Occupied and observed.
“Next time they cut the feed,” Johnny says, “You call it sooner.”
“You werent there.”
“I am now.”
V doesnt respond to that.
He sits on the edge of his bed instead, elbows on his knees, running through variables.
If Arasaka detected the anomaly, they wouldnt send a strike team first.
Theyd gather data.
Repeat scans.
Test parameters.
He lies back without bothering to undress.
Johnny remains standing near the bathroom door, posture rigid.
The city outside keeps pulsing like nothing changes.
Inside, something has.
This time, the silence doesnt feel empty.
It feels like someone is listening.