Chapter Text
“Jesus,” Barry groaned. “There they go.”
“Mhm,” River hummed. He tried to not stare at the car too openly but it matched Welles’s description and the partial license plate he gave them. But it was leaving the landfill. Which meant that they’d already dumped her. That in itself did not bode well.
Judging from the grim look on Barry’s face he knew the man thought the same thing. The chances of this being a rescue was minimal at best, but in the very least he would retrieve her…body. To think it was only last night that he’d first laid eyes on her sparkly smile and that mischievous glint in her beautiful brown eyes.
Now she was gone.
The leather of the steering wheel groaned under his tight grip. “They came from that way,” he said tersely, then set off in the direction he’d seen the car coming from. They skipped every bit of protocol in the book to catch up to the culprits as fast as they could. If he hadn’t, well, then there would’ve been a guaranteed repeat of his last investigation.
Mack couldn’t speed up fast enough, it was an old hunk of junk, but still reliable. Just getting a bit slow.
“End of the road,” Barry remarked as they rolled up to a giant mountain of trash. “She could be anywhere.”
River killed the ignition and stepped out of the truck. He scanned the area, noting the fresh tracks in the mud and series of footprints. Also fresh.
“Gotta be close by,” he said following the tracks. “We’ll have to dig, they wouldn’t risk leaving her out in the open. There’s flashlights in the back.” He turned on night mode on his cybereye, but since he hadn’t had the time to get it fixed it wasn’t easy to see much with or without night vision.
“Here,” Barry said as he jogged up to him, handing him a flashlight.
They started treading the heaps of trash, shoving aside large pieces that looked like they could hide a body. Seconds stretched into minutes, one step, two steps, a chunk of metal here and a giant trash bag there… It all melted together as time crept by. They didn’t talk, nor did they shout for her just in case the assholes would return.
No, they searched in silence, keeping their flashlights pointed down to search each nook and crevice.
A blanket of melancholy fell over him. This damn city would be the end of him too one day. The City of fucking Dreams. For the rich maybe, but not for anyone else. It was all a beautifully wrapped shithole filled with false promises and groundless hopes. And tonight it had claimed another victim. Another victim he couldn’t save in time.
His boot caught on something soft and he paused, crouching down to get a better look. A foot, wearing a high heeled shoe. He raised his flashlight and signaled Barry who promptly stopped what he was doing and made his way over.
River pulled aside a metal sheet, then an old TV the size of a damn car and tossed it aside. His heart skipped a beat, his gaze caught on bloodied face and the empty hazel eyes staring up at him. Dead. He didn’t even need to check her pulse to know, the endless stare and the gaping hole between her eyes was proof enough. With one slow move he swept his hand over her face, closing her eyes.
“Is she dead?”
“Yes,” he said solemnly. He gathered her up in his arms carefully, as if it made any difference, and swallowed the lump in his throat. “Let’s take her back. The ripper or Jackie will know who to contact.” She had mentioned a mother and a brother, but she’d never told him their names and he suspected ‘V’ wasn’t really her name either. So he had no way of finding her family.
Barry nodded and let out a shaky breath. “Fucking hell,” he muttered, his shoulders slumping.
It was a long walk back to the truck, each step feeling heavier than the last. He kept studying her face, hoping, praying that he’d been wrong that she would open her eyes. No chance of that happening though.
He climbed into the back seat and motioned for Barry to drive. He just couldn’t let himself let go of her yet, didn’t want her to be alone. As stupid as it sounded… He hadn’t even had the chance to get to know her before she’d been taken away.
Barry shook his head as he backed up and turned the truck around. “Like what’s even the point,” he said quietly. “If not even someone of her caliber can survive this fucking place, then what even are the rest of us doing here?”
“Our best,” River said. “That’s all we can ever do.”
Barry fell silent after that, lost in his own thoughts and focused on the road ahead.
Despite it all, River placed two fingers where her pulse should be. Nothing. Just nothing but cold skin. He tilted her head to the side to examine the injury. No exit wound, which meant the bullet was lodged in her brain or skull. Low caliber then, and a shit gun. Not that it had mattered in her case. No pulse, no life.
Thud.
River blinked. That had to have been wrong, or he’d just felt his own pulse in his fingertips.
Thud………thud.
He straightened up, adjusted her enough so that he could bend down and listen to her heart. Thud……thud…thu-thud-thu-thud.
“Holy shit,” he breathed out.
“What?” Barry asked, trying to look at them through the rearview mirror.
“That’s…impossible. Her heart just started beating,” he said, not quite believing his own words. What the hell? He was sure there’d been no pulse there until now, but… maybe he’d been wrong? It could have been so faint he just hadn’t noticed. “Step on it, Barry! She’s alive!”
Her eyes flew open as she sucked in a lungful of air. She started flailing weakly. No, reaching. She was reaching for something at her hip. There was nothing but an empty holster there, the gun long gone. Maybe it fell out at some point or she lost it during the job.
“Woah there, easy, easy,” he cooed as he reached over and grabbed her hand. “Hey, hey, look at me.” Her panicked eyes shifted to him then, and she blinked several times before the panic slowly melted away. “Yeah, remember me? The fumbling gonk from last night. And if you look in the driver’s seat you’ll find your favorite neighbor.”
Her gaze flicked forward and Barry waved to her in the rearview mirror. “Hey, V,” he said, his voice a bit shaky. “Gave us a bit of a scare there,” he added with a forced chuckle.
Her lips parted but no words came out, just barely audible moans. He felt her relax in his arms and her head lulled against his chest as her eyes fluttered close again as a soft sigh passed her lips. River, however, tensed up as he made sure his fingers stayed on the side of throat making sure he kept track of that soft sign of life.
She kept going in and out of consciousness for the rest of the drive. Sometimes he’d look down to find her watching him in silence only for her to close her eyes and drift away once again. One time she’d managed to utter a single name and he’d reassured her that Jackie had made it to the clinic and he’d been alive and well the last time he saw him.
That seemed to have eased her worries and she’d slipped off again and stayed unconscious until they parked outside Misty’s shop. With the merc bundled up in his arms he slipped out of the truck and hurried inside, running through Misty’s shop and out to the back alley then down the steps to the clinic. He was aware of Barry following behind, but he kept his attention on the woman in his arms.
“She’s alive,” he announced as he bounced down the steps. “Shot in the head. Bullet’s still inside.”
“Chair, now,” Doctor Vektor said. “Everything’s ready.”
River placed her down gently, her head lulled to the side and he carefully straightened her up. The doc would need to see it to examine her, couldn’t do that if-
The doc just waved him aside, silently commanding him to step back and stay out of the way. His fingers swift and sure and every move deliberate. He soon had her connected to his computers and her vitals showed up on his displays. Misty joined them and fell into her role in assisting Vektor with the surgery, handing him tools when he asked, sometimes even before he asked, and wiped away blood when needed.
River stepped back, unsure if he should leave or stay. The doctor hadn’t explicitly told them to leave, but then again he was too busy keeping V alive to really notice them.
“Think she’ll make it?” Barry asked quietly.
“She’s in good hands,” he said, keeping his voice equally as low so he wouldn’t disturb the doctor. He glanced at Barry. “I’ll be sticking around, if you want to go home and get some rest.” Barry hesitated so River added, “I’ll holler on the holo if anything changes.”
Barry nodded. “Alright, if you need to crash just come on up.”
“Thanks, man.” He patted Barry on the shoulder before the man shuffled out of the clinic. River puffed his cheeks and sat down on a stool and braced his elbows on his knees.
“...gotta cut through the occipital bone, no other choice…” Vektor said, mostly to himself. He did that for each thing he did, talked himself through everything. It reminded River of a dentist.
The surgery took a painstakingly long time and it was early morning by the time the bullet was out, her skull reinforced and the wound stitched and bandaged. He helped move her to a proper bed but the ripper didn’t want her moved to one of the back rooms where her partner was resting. He needed to keep an eye on her, he said, watch for any changes.
River didn’t argue and didn’t press the doctor about his own appointment even though the glitches were beginning to give him a raging headache. It wasn't important right now.
Vektor sat hunched in front of the computer, V’s vitals ticking in one corner and something else occupying most of the screen. A bunch of medical jargon that River couldn’t make heads or tails of, but he took note of the worries frowns on the doc’s face.
“Can’t be…” Vektor muttered to himself as he got up and walked to V’s side. He tilted her head slightly and pushed her hair out of the way to reveal her chip ports. River leaned forward, trying to see what he was doing, but then the computers started screaming and her vitals fluctuated wildly. “Shit,” Vektor muttered. He did something again and it all went quiet and her vitals slowly stabilized.
“What was that?” River asked and the doctor nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Dammit, Ward,” the man huffed. “Nearly scared the life outta me.” He ran hand through his thinning hair. “Not sure what it is, some experimental tech not on the market. It’s labeled ‘Relic 2.0’ on the main file and it seems to contain…a digital version of a person if I’m reading it correctly. Gotta do some more research though. But it’s damaged, I was gonna remove it but it seems to be…integrating with her neural net. Which concerns me,” the doc's words faded and River got the feeling he was mostly talking to himself again.
“Strange,” Vektor went on, now looking at her brain scan. “How very, very strange. Come, look here,” he said and motioned to the screen.
River pulled his stool over and peered at the screen though he wasn’t sure what he was looking at.
“See here,” Vektor said, pointing at some discoloration on the scan. “These are nanites that were stored within the chip. The bullet damaged the chip slot and the chip and somehow initiated what is called the ‘Engram Protocol’ according to the data I found. They seem to have started repairing her damaged brain tissue before you even made it into the city. In fact,” he said and opened up the live feed of her biomon. “Here it shows a full flatline for a full hour and twenty-three minutes, she was by all rights dead. But the nanites from the damaged chip brought her back.”
River frowned. “So I wasn’t imagining things when she suddenly regained a heartbeat.”
“Nope, she quite literally came back from the dead. But,” he opened another file, “this is what’s on the chip. From what I can gather it’s a digitised psyche, a copy of a person that the chip is now actively trying to upload to her neural net. Effectively working on erasing her in the process.”
River blinked. “What? What does that mean?”
“It means,” he said slowly. “That if we can’t separate the chip and the nanites from her brain, eventually V will no longer exist, and in her place will be this man; Robert John Linder. Also more commonly known as Johnny Silverhand. Rockerboy and terrorist from back in the twenties.”
“The guy that nuked Arasaka tower,” River finished. “How much time does she have? And what do we do?”
“Too early to tell, the process hasn’t even reached the first percentage,” Vektor said. “For now it seems that the nanites are more focused on healing her rather than rewiring her. Only once she’s back on her feet will I be able to make an estimate. As for what we do… I dunno, this is outside my field of expertise. Got no fucking clue where to even begin.”
River scratched his chin. “And guessin’ we can’t just take it out? That’s what you tried just now, right?”
Vektor nodded solemnly. “She’s dependent on it now, if we yank it out she’ll die. If it’s left in, she’ll die.” He sat up straight abruptly and turned to face River. “Well damn, I forgot about your appointment. Go on, get in the chair.”
“Oh, we can wait. I don’t mind. You must be exhausted.” God knows he himself was. It had been a very long night.
“Nonsense, siddown, detective.” Vektor rose and started tinkering with his tools. “Couldn’t sleep now even if I tried. So get in the chair. And let’s consider this appointment on the house. Payment for saving V’s life.”
After a moment of thought he decided to follow the doc’s orders and climbed into the chair. It felt odd, knowing that mere hours ago the woman he’d talked to one single time, and had somehow burrowed into his mind and soul, had been fighting for her life in that very same chair. But that was true for most ripper chairs he supposed, but it just felt closer to home right at that moment.
“So,” Vektor said. “How’d you know V? Can’t say I've seen you around before.”
“Oh, heh, since the other day. We met less than forty-eight hours ago,” he gave the doc a sheepish smile. “Asked her out actually.”
“Now that’s what we call lucky timing,” Vektor chuckled. “Who knows what would’ve happened if you hadn’t been here. Hold still, time to remove the cybernetic eye…”
No matter how many times he’d done it, it always felt odd when the cybereye was taken out. He was still connected to it, and would see from both the angles of his regular eye and the cyber one. Which could be nauseating with too much movement.
“So my next question will be; Did she accept?” Vektor asked with a slight grin. “Known the kid for months now and can’t say I’ve ever seen nor heard her talking about dating. You must have been convincing.”
River let out a chuckle. “Guess I’m lucky too then. She did give me her number after all.” He glanced over her sleeping form and his smile faded. How trivial it was to talk about dating when she now had much more important things to worry about. He wanted to help her, but… What could he even do?
“My my, must truly be serious then,” Vektor mused and winked at him before looking down at the cyberware and kept on tinkering. “Ah, I see what the issue is now. This should only take a minute,” Vektor said slowly.
River leaned his head back and his attention drifted once again to V. Her chest rose and fell with the soft breathing of sleep and her expression was peaceful. No longer panicked or contorted in pain. But that didn’t mean she was alright. If what the ripperdoc said was true, then she was actively dying even if the vitals didn’t show it. To be deleted and replaced by another, he could barely imagine it. The thought was just too…otherworldly.
“That should do it,” Vektor said and inserted the cyberware back into its socket. “As good as new. You should get some rest, even heroes need sleep,” he chuckled. “If you want I could notify you when she wakes, though she’ll be out for a while. Got a lot of healing to do, that one.”
“If she consents to it, then I wouldn't mind,” River said as he slid off the chair and stood up.
“Of course, I’ll make sure to ask her. Go on now,” the doc said and nodded towards the exit. “And don’t be a stranger.”
“I won’t, don’t think my eye has been this good in ages,” he added with a wry smile. And it wasn’t a lie either. He stopped at V’s side and reached over to take her hand, but he stopped, unsure if she’d have wanted him to touch her. What could he even say? Sorry you're dying? Still up for that lunch? Good luck and may the odds be ever in your favor?
Sometimes silence was the best choice.
Still, he hoped she would survive.