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At first, Goro thinks he got the wrong door.
Broken glass, pills, and pieces of plastic on the floor, an overturned chair, a pile of clothes on the bed… it seems that the ward still isn't cleaned after the previous patient. Then he recognizes some details: hair, faded to such shade of white it merges in color with the pillow, and angle of elbow, visible in the cloth, and fingers gripping the edge of the mattress with such force that knuckles turned white.
“V,” Goro calls. She doesn't move and something inside him breaks off: he is too late.
But she isn't dead, not yet, now Goro can see her breathing. He comes closer and touches her shoulder.
“Wake up,” he says, and then adds, “please.”
The magic word works. V opens her eyes, turns to his voice. Her face is dreadfully empty, irises bounce around her scleras scanning the space. With a silver glare, her optics focus on him, and the light comes back to her face.
“Goro.”
V rushes forward so fast, he has no time to say anything. The air gets pushed out of his chest when she buries her face in his stomach, arms closed on the lower of his back.
“You came for me? To take me home? Fuck, this place is so horrible, I can’t take it anymore,” her voice breaks, but she keeps talking, and Goro can feel her hot breath even through the dense fabric of his shirt. “Is g-force any painful? I was out cold while they took me here like I was cargo, so didn’t feel shit. But I’m afraid to go back. Were you afraid? Why did I ask, you’re probably been here dozens of times, got used to it. Can we go now? Say something already!”
But Goro just silently stares at his own hands, stuck in the air, completely useless.
He wants to say It’s going to be alright but can’t lie.
He wants to touch her, but he’s too afraid.
The collar of her hospital shirt slid to the side, exposing the protruding vertebrae. V seems made of bird bones and paper, she’s fragile as сhōchin : one careless touch and the paper will tear and the wind will blow out the candle inside the lantern, forever.
He stays like this, speechless, frozen until V lets go of him herself. It's probably better this way, but Goro feels like a piece of an idiot. These words, precisely: it was V who called him this way, and now he feels how much it suits.
V looks at him cautiously and attentively as if she can’t decide if he is himself. Who does he seem to her, a digital ghost or his own evil clone?
Goro says:
“You look like back then, on the landfill.”
“Told me the truth at least,” V snorts and makes herself comfortable on the bed pulling legs under her. “Rare thing here. I can see it on your face, the news is no good, huh? Spit it out.”
Goro knows exactly what he should say. He prepared. He composed a speech and memorized it while chanting it like a mantra as g-force was pushing him into the shuttle's seat.
His speech starts with “You are dying.”
Goro repeated it many times, but now he just can’t start talking. As if once words are spoken nothing could be changed anymore. It’s stupid, inevitability can’t be canceled by silence, yet Goro turns away anyway and picks up the overturned chair to give V some more time.
But when their eyes meet again he has no choice just to say:
“The surgery did not help you. You are still dying.”
“F-f-fuck,” V hisses so quiet it sounds like air coming out of the broken bulkhead. “I knew this.”
Goro expects her to get angry, to scream, to say everything she thinks about Arasaka in general, and about him, and his promises. But V just asks quietly:
“And what should I do now?”
He wishes she was angry.
V turns to the wall, silent. She nods sometimes to show she’s listening as he tells her about Hanako-sama’s offer and digital souls' storage. He has to read the contract’s terms aloud as she doesn’t look at the tablet.
Here, in this room flooded with merciless white light V looks so small, so insignificant. It’s so hard to believe that all the chaos surrounded her was real.
V came out of nowhere, a new celestial body in the stellar system changing the usual order of things.
At first, Goro blamed her for what happened, then he realized she wasn’t the reason. She was just a victim of gravity like he was. Pulled from the streets of the city, like a pile of frozen rocks and ice is pulled from the asteroid belt and dragged forward turning into the comet.
But no comet is able to carry a planet with it, even if the planet’s star just exploded.
Goro is stuck at the Lagrange point along with the whole Arasaka space station.
Goro is stuck at his own Lagrange point because his sun shines again and drags him back to his usual orbit.
But this fragile equilibrium won't last for long. He didn't fulfill his promise: Arasaka helped V, yet she is still dying.
“Several months,” V repeats his words, still looking at the wall. “How much is this “several”?
“You will not live to see your birthday.”
She turns around sharply, and by this Goro gets that he said too much.
“You know my birthday?”
He wishes she was angry.
Because now V is smiling, and in the light of that smile he sees her more clearly than ever before. The girl, who is afraid to die far away from home. The woman, who came back for him despite she thought it was too late. The thief from the down of Night City streets, who reached the stars just to get burned alive.
V looks at Goro as if she sees him too: the man tearing apart by the gravity of his debts and attachments.
This is unbearable.
“Early winter,” says Goro, hoping his ruthless tone will kill what he is afraid to name even in his head. “By the most optimistic prognosis you...”
“I want to live, Goro,” V interrupts, “so, so much.”
She takes the tablet from his hands, puts her finger on it, and only then asks: “Will we meet again?”
“I hope for this. I should show you what real food is.”
“Any food is real,” V stands up, “if you’re hungry enough.”
Even she doesn’t laugh at her joke.
“All the equipment for your transition is ready,” Goro says. “No need to wait for you to feel worse.”
“Like it’s even possible,” V mumbles indistinctly, then looks up and her eyes meet his.
Goro thinks she will hug him again. He almost wants her to do it because he won’t dare, but she just walks away, silently. The sound of her steps gets louder as the soft carpet is changed by the deck’s floor…
He can go after her. He must go after her, he must do for her at least this. It’s not too late to catch up with V and take her hand so she won’t have to go alone into the darkness.
But Goro doesn't move, just the tablet screen cracks under his fingers.
Messages come one after another. The first one says his shuttle to Takamatsu will launch in twenty minutes, the second one is short: “The procedure was successful”.
No matter who V became to him, she’s gone now.
He promised to save her. He failed.
This unfulfilled debt feels so heavy it seems the stars should leave their orbits coming to a new gravity source, but when Goro comes to the porthole, he sees Earth. The planet far away peacefully floats through the void. The universe is alright, it is his inner space that goes crazy.
The fragile shell of the station is surrounded by a vacuum, endless, immortal, indifferent. It doesn’t care about this tiny human pressing his palm to reinforced glass, saying:
“We will meet again. I promise.”