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 7
As with most things in her life, somewhere, somehow, something in Evey’s master plan had gone wrong.
It had started small, as most truly scary things tend to do.
V grew quieter and more introspective. He was restless and irritable. At first she brushed it off as a normal reaction for a very active man who was suddenly stuck in bed with nothing to do.
But then he stopped reading and she assumed that he was depressed. When she layered the completion of what he had believed to be his life’s work on top of being bedridden, some sort of emotional fallout was only to be expected.
To try to combat his deepening sadness, she brought him his art supplies. She had seen him painting before and knew that he enjoyed the creative process. He was also very good at it. Not surprising since she had yet to identify something he wasn’t good at.
She thought that he would continue to do portraits like he had in the past, beautiful, expressive glimpses into the souls of people he saw during his trips topside. But he didn’t. Instead his drawings were abstract, mind bending lines and shapes and shadows that all flowed around each other, a pattern almost emerging but not quite. And they were dark. Not the colors, those were bright, lively, almost manic. The mood was dark, the lines too heavy and oppressive, the shadows too deep and menacing. The light areas were too bright to see clearly. They were beautiful but foreboding.
Contributing to her worry was the alarming rate of production and the growing repetitive nature of them. She could step away for a few hours and return to a snowstorm of paper all covered with the same drawing. The only change being that they grew darker, ever darker and the man behind the mask grew more and more distant with every stroke.
He stopped talking. He abandoned chivalry, failing to even acknowledge her when she entered the room and he left every plate she brought him untouched.
Finally she was compelled to take away the drawing materials. She couldn’t watch what was happening to him and hoped that if she could get his head back in books that perhaps he would come back out of the inner turmoil he was ensconced in.
Her plan met with marginal success. He did not protest the loss of his art supplies and she got him to focus his energy elsewhere but it was not an improvement.
He dragged his protesting legs to the piano and grew roots at the bench. He didn’t play the classical pieces he usually enjoyed. Instead he banged out the same notes over and over and over. Ugly, nonsensical notes that howled in pain and screamed their rage throughout the Shadow Gallery.
Evey felt her powerlessness in the face of his pain and her worry was quickly being replaced by fear.
Adding insult to injury, the world above continued on even as the Shadow Gallery was swallowed in darkness. She had no choice but divide her time between the formation of new government and the self destruction of the man she loved. Every session topside with its ideas, arguments, agreements and to-do lists was torture for her. She could not drag her mind away from the man far below going mad while beating the life out of a baby grand.
Coming home from the latest meeting with it’s unresolved but ever narrowing set of options, she walked into silence.
Hopeful that V was finally coming around she went to look for him but he had not abandoned his post. He sat at the piano, head in his hands rocking. Not a good sign. Circling around him was a vast sea of sheet music. As she moved closer making sure to be very loud in her approach so she wouldn’t startle him, she noticed that once again there was a near pattern in the madness of paper.
What did it mean?
V was very neat and organized but he wasn’t obsessive. He could live with her moving things and having a dodgy record where picking up after her self was concerned. He might chide her for making a mess but he didn’t really care beyond the teasing.
She knew he had a love of symmetry, that he appreciated the patterns that emerged if he was still before a painting or reflecting on a book. He would tell her about them, weaving together seamless mosaics that she could only see through his eyes.
Perhaps it was a pattern he was struggling with. Maybe he was seeing something that he could not make sense of and was obsessing on it. She had to find some way to either help him see it or help him forget it. It was a task much more easily stated than accomplished.
“V?”
When he heard his name, his face shot up and without looking at her he leapt to his feet and bolted down a dark hallway.
She gave chase and rounding a bend in the corridor, she saw the heel of his boot fly into a room as something gold breezed by her cheek and hit the wall with a tinkling sound.
She slammed into the door only to find it barred against her. She pounded on it for a while, shouting his name but there was no response.
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