French, means: “It goes without saying”
Summary: V survives the shooting and the story continues.
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Nothing from V for Vendetta is mine. This is just for fun.
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Chapter 6
Evey
As the mouth piece of the group and the leader of nonviolence faction the more days that passed without result the harder her job became.
She wanted the remaining Norsefire brass to be tried in a court of law, convicted by juries of their peers and imprisoned for the rest of their natural lives. She would use those enemies as examples, just as Norsefire had done. The only difference was that she would use them to prove to the people that justice would apply to all, not just the masses of faceless ‘undesirables’. She would show them this by treating even the worst among them fairly. Where Norsefire had been secrets, lies and violence, the new democratic government would be free, transparent and fair.
Norsefire’s grasp on the reins of government might have been weakening, their ability to control the media slipping each day, but their security remained impeccable. She had not yet been able to formulate a decent plan to capture the three men she needed to bring the entire house of cards down.
Those advocating a quicker solution were gaining strength. If she could not deliver a change in regime soon, her dreams of equal protection under the law would die and the new government would be no better than those they replaced.
It was a huge responsibility and one she would have gladly handed over to someone else if she felt she could.
If that had been all that consumed her thoughts that would have been overwhelming enough but in addition, and to her more importantly, she was also tending an injured man who came complete with more issues than any politician running for office could hope to juggle.
For over a week she had been racing topside for meetings and speeches while at the same time taking care of him…as much as he would let her anyway. He was determined to thwart her every effort to help him. His only concession had been leaving her in charge of meals which he politely refused to eat with her.
He would always plead a lack of hunger, absorption in the book he was reading, being too tired at the moment, or feeling a little nauseous to avoid it. Before when he had been healthy, he’d always insisted that he ate as he cooked and by the time he was done he was too full to eat more.
Genius was not needed to figure out that he would do almost anything to keep her from peaking behind the mask. She didn’t know why it mattered so much to him, but since it did, she didn’t press the issue further than asking him to join her every time she fed him.
During the time she had been away she had been obsessed with him. She knew so little about him. But what little she information she had, she researched. Mostly that was torture and burns.
She was by that time intimately familiar with torture even though she knew what had happened to her only scratched the surface of the cesspool of human depravity. Try though she might, she couldn’t bring herself to think of things worse than what she herself had endured.
Instead she researched burns. She looked into the different types, the different levels of severity and what each meant to the victim. She took particular interest in the healing process. Not a single thing about being burned was good. Perhaps the loss of nerve endings from a 3rd degree burn was something of a cruel blessing but when coupled with the horrendous pain of the 2nd degree burns that surrounded them and the lifelong loss of sensation, made burns the most agonizing injury a body could suffer.
She had seen V’s hands only once. Those were 3rd degree burns and he was very lucky to still have his fingers. Most people whose hands burned lost several digits in the process. More than that, he was lucky to still have the dexterity that he had. Scar tissue is thick and inelastic rendering limbs encased in it inflexible and weak. V was anything but weak or inflexible. He was also very sensitive to touch, which was something she planned to make use of in the near future.
It was natural to wonder how much more of him was burned in the fire. He had never said. Judging from the mask, his face had been injured. Thus she had paid specific attention to facial burns trying to figure out what the worst possible case could be under the smiling face of Guy Fawkes. She had to know if she could live with it.
No matter how she thought about it, it was shallow. What is inside is the important thing. The shell changes on everyone. There would come a day when she was no longer beautiful too. But still. If she was honest with herself, it was very hard to get past appearances.
So she found as many pictures of people who had been burned as she could and she studied them, looking for the beauty that had to be there. At first all she could do was pity the poor souls whose faces had melted like wax candles and left them with features that barely looked human. Many had lost ears, lost noses, lips, even eye lids. It was horrible to look at and she felt overwhelmed with pity.
But as she continued, she started to see other things. She trained her eye to see past what was missing or deformed and find what was beautiful and precious. It started with the eyes. There was something different in the eyes.
These were people who had seen things most would be lucky enough not to and that reflected in their eyes. The strength and determination, the defiance that stared back at her from the photographs was strikingly lovely. And made all the more so because so often they shown from heavily damaged faces.
Eventually she could even see the difference between the people who were recently burned and those that had adjusted to their new skin. The first group was angry, they were still thinking it could get better and were thus embarrassed. The later group though, they were tired of being stared at, sick of being pitied and ready to just get on with it if everyone else would just leave them alone long enough to do it.
The conclusion of her research was that even though 20 years had passed V was somewhere in limbo between the two groups. She blamed his isolation for that. She also decided that even if his face was completely destroyed, even if his entire body was covered in scars, it didn’t matter. The man behind the façade of Guy Fawkes, beneath the mask of scars, under the camouflage of chivalry, he was beautiful and she loved him.
She had known that she did long before November 4th when she was finally ready to admit it to him. She just tried to fight it off which was a lot like running as fast as she could to avoid getting wet in a rain storm.
The trouble was that she had convinced herself that he did not reciprocate those feelings. The result was that she couldn’t work up the courage to share her own. After all, could a man in love torture the object of his affections? Other than that terrible month, he had been the poster boy for renaissance era chivalry, Miss Manners’ star pupil and thus aloof and untouchable. There was always a distance between them. Nothing that he had done indicated to her that he felt anything beyond a friendly student/teacher type of level. But then on the train tracks, bleeding to death, he told her he was in love with her. What was that?
For two horrible hours he was dead and she thought of all the things she wished she’d said to him, the things she wished she’d showed him. She bargained with God, promising that if he gave V back to her she would make him know love. She would show him what it was and that he could have it, that he already had it. She would do it the same way he taught her that fear was useless. Then they would be even.
Now that she had the chance, she was not going to waste it.
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