The way Wren's laugh died and the way the air between them changed was something V caught on to immediately but he was ready to just ignore it and break up the conversation and move on in an attempt to avoid any particular confrontation. The longer the uncomfortable silence lingered the closer he was to this but they started to talk.

V's response was, at first, silence. The first question - if there was any other name he went by - he registered easily thanks to how slowly they initially asked it. The rest of it he needed a moment to work through - adjusting to not having subtitles in his vision for everything everyone said was tougher than he'd expected. He never realized how much he'd relied on it until he didn't have them.

He was of a notion that he should tell them to fucking deal and call him V but his expression softened a little as the reasoning for their request settled in. He could understand. If their name had been Gabriel or Gabe he would have asked to call them literally anything else, even Liberty, to avoid dealing with that ghost of his past.

"Vincent," he finally gave. His inflection was carefully neutral, trying to avoid his discomfort with giving out his real name. "Don't got any other handles I go by."

Not without deadnaming himself, anyway, but even as a kid he used V with strangers he'd never worked with before.

"I get it, though. Don't worry about it. Just appreciate it if you don't shorten it at all."