'Perhaps to many readers this last reason will seem the best of all. However much we may moralize about its baseness and hollowness, whether with the Hugo of Les Chatiments we scorn and vituperate its charlatan head or pity him profoundly as we see him ill and helpless in Zola's debacle.'
- Alphonse Daudet
It was such a simple thing, silence. It eased into the cracks in V's mind and soothed him. It smoothed over the nightmares that kept Evey awake. So simple, and yet it had insinuated itself into every part of their lives. Such a simple thing, and it muffled all their problems. The silence was so loud, there was no more room for thought.
They didn't talk about Evey's packing. They didn't talk about V's increasingly long hours away from the Gallery, preparing for the Fifth. They didn't talk about the turmoil going on aboveground. They didn't talk about the danger.
They didn't talk about the times their bodies crashed together almost without their consent. They didn't talk about the cell. They didn't talk about how time seemed to be racing forward. Most of all, they didn't talk about the silence. It had descended between them, and it would not be lifted.
V had stopped questioning the silence. He did not understand how Evey could so completely control him. A look from her could drop him to the ground. He did not allow himself to think about the times he would lose himself in her. A smile from her made him feel real. It was ridiculous, really; a revolution was being planned, and he was worrying about his relationship. If you could call it that.
He knew something was wrong with what they had - whatever it might be. More accurately, he would have been hard-pressed to find anything right in what he shared with Evey. It baffled him. It disturbed him, in a way he could not specify even to himself.
He loved her. That was not even worth mentioning, although it affected everything he did. He loved her completely, terrifyingly. He would have died for her. He would die for her. He would give her everything he had, everything he was, for just one more moment in her presence. That didn't make it right.
V had no firsthand experience of love. Although the edges of memories would sometimes slip across his mind, they were momentary flashes of sex, and ultimately meaningless. His knowledge of love existed entirely within the realm of books and films and music. And while he knew, with every twisted fiber of his being, that he loved Evey, he still knew something was wrong.
V had always envisioned himself more like Mr. Darcy than the Marquis de Sade. Having no prior knowledge, he had assumed that perhaps one part of him might be more conventional. But whenever he walked away from an encounter with Evey, he felt sick. Diseased and dirty, in a way that was utterly foreign to him.
It wasn't the sex. Despite his enforced chastity, V had never been a prude. He was smart enough to know that his own desires were not as bizarre as he liked to believe. Unusual, yes; extraordinary, no. No, when his body joined with Evey's, he felt no shame or guilt. Being in her arms soothed him. It wasn't the physical act that caused him pain.
It was after. V's whole life was before and after: before V, after Five. Before Valerie. After Larkhill. Before the burns. After Guy. Before Evey. After the Fifth. After V. Now there was before sex, and after. Of all the divisions in his life, this one was the hardest to comprehend.
V had never been a sexual creature. He hadn't the inclination, or the opportunity. For twenty years his entire focus had been on his revolution, the Gallery, revenge. His private, lonely moments of self-gratification had been infrequent.
Then Evey had entered his life, and brought with her a whole new type of anarchy. One which he viewed with suspicion, if not open distrust. He had become intensely aware of his own presence, of the way his body moved and how she reacted to him. Even before he had ever touched her, she had created something within him that lacked a name, or control.
For the first time in his life, V had felt lust and tenderness, emotions that alarmed him with their intensity. Love continued to be beyond analysis, beyond even simple comprehension.
V had loved, in a way, before Evey. He loved Valerie in a complicated and and conflicted way, but he had never had to face her. He knew Valerie better than anyone on earth, but he had never met her. Such distinctions had made loving her safe, easy.
Emotions were new to V. For twenty years he had claimed only a small number. Rage, of course. Sometimes grief. Amusement and affection, on rare occasions. Beyond Valerie, he had no emotional investment in any other creature on earth. His love had been solely for her. Unrequited, on one level. Academic, in the most intimate way possible. And thoroughly safe. The one thing in his life that lacked danger.
Evey was not safe. All sharp edges and rough words, Evey had never been safe. Evey was desire and love and loss and fury and fear and heartbreak. Evey was blindingly, excruciatingly human and alive.
V didn't know what to do. He didn't want these feelings. They hurt him, in the one place where scars had been welcomed. He tried to reject the feelings, kill them, or block them out. They made him weak. They made him small. They made him doubtful and unsure. They made him human. And he craved them almost as much as he longed for revenge.
That was part of the problem. During - because with before and after, there must be a during - he never thought. He was too caught up in the moment, a creature of sensations and desires. In many ways, he was free. But after, his mind came roaring back in a way he had come to dread.
They disgusted him, these emotions and reactions. Who was that hesitant, cringing creature forcing his diseased and disfigured body onto a hurt and angry woman? Why couldn't that thing see how useless this all was? He was clinging desperately to the last strands of an aborted life, when he should be preparing for the end of everything. It was the worst, most dangerous form of denial.
But even that wasn't what damaged him. That wasn't what made him short with Evey, and filled him with loathing over what he had become. It was something far simpler; something that made him crave the silence.
It was him. His needs. His desires. His fantasies. He never hurt her, when they were together. He didn't think he could. Sometimes her actions bordered on violence, but V was never cruel. Not to her.
He wanted to be. With his hands on her body, he would envision pain and smell blood. He didn't want to hurt her. Not Evey. He wanted to hurt himself. He was hurting himself. Denial wasn't working anymore.
He wanted to mark her, leave some proof on her body of his brief ownership. He wanted that moment to hurt her, scar her forever. He wanted to cement their union, the connection that had been forged between them through flesh. And for V, union meant pain.
V did not have a romanticized view of pain. He couldn't possibly. But it aroused him in a way that gnawed incessantly at his sense of self. He wanted her to hurt him. He would hurt her for one brief moment, mark his place on her body, and she could spend an eternity destroying him. Her nails in his flesh, her teeth digging into his skin, her muscles clenching torturing him exquisitely - it seemed an appropriate fee for such pleasure. Nowhere near how much it would end up costing him.
Sometimes V felt that the only way to get through to Evey, to share himself and let her know how he truly felt, would be to kill her. Slash her throat while they made love, at the height of her orgasm. And in doing so, he would kill himself, collapsing bleeding and dead onto her still twitching body. It was a thought - somewhere between a fantasy and a nightmare - that haunted him when he least expected it.
There was something very, very wrong with his love. Like every other aspect of himself, V's love was a poison. A virus. In touching Evey, letting his diseased flesh come into contact with hers, he was spreading the sickness of his own fantasies.
His love was not pure and kind and selfless. It was neither tender nor sweet. V's love was violence and gunpowder and chaos. V's love was hurt and regret and death. V's love was another form of torture.
He would resolve not to touch her, usually when he could still smell her on his skin. She was leaving. So was he. It should have been simple. Things used to be simple - of that he was sure. And he had survived horrors beyond comprehension.
But then she would look at him. Or touch him. Or call out to him. And he would fall. He would find himself tangled up with her, making Evey scream with pleasure, and wonder at what moment this had begun.
And when it finally ended, he didn't want her to leave. He needed her to leave. She needed to leave. It was essential that she walk away. That didn't make the idea sting any less.
Soon he would be gone. He would follow Valerie to whatever followed this life. All this would be left behind. It was a comfort he allowed himself to dwell upon. His own death was was something he viewed with a grim pleasure.
But Evey would live. He needed to ensure that. Evey would live, and there would be other men. Men who could smile at her. Men who could meet her eyes with nothing between them. Men with names. Men with futures.
This too was a source of comfort, albeit a bittersweet one. He did not want to survive Evey. Nor did he expect her to mourn him as he would have her. He had accepted that other men would share Evey's bed, know her body as he did.
But he could not bear the idea that there would be no proof of his time with her. V wanted to know that Evey would carry some mark of their struggles. Not out of vanity; simply as evidence that someone had been capable of touching him so deeply. She hadn't felt what he had felt. If he was gone, there was nothing left.
V carried many people on his body. There was Stanton, her initials on every strand of the virus still within him. Under scar tissue born from the fire, there were still memories of beatings. He carried with him the guards who had raped him. Prothero's taser. The Chanceller's laws. The Bishop's complicity. Valerie and the fire he had built in her honor. A Viking funeral. Should have been his own.
There were no scars of kindness on him. Evey had no scars from him. None that he could see. Even that detective had marked her, in a way. The scar on her forehead was proof. Proof of her courage, of their real beginning. Proof, perhaps, that she cared for what he believed in. Maybe even believed in him.
The bruises from her torture were almost gone. There was no mark on her body that even hinted at how desperately he loved her. It was almost like none of it had ever happened.
V was in his study, alone with his thoughts. He could hear Evey moving around somewhere in the Gallery. Maybe packing. Maybe washing his scent from her skin.
V knew his love was not returned. After what he had done, it baffled him how Evey could even look at him. She claimed not to understand, and he believed her. For her, their coupling was not about love. It was purely about revenge. In for a penny. Penny for the Guy.
It made it easier for him to love her, the knowledge that his feelings were not reciprocated. However she might remember him, it would not be with regret. To be remembered by her at all was enough. It had to be - there was nothing else.
Evey stood in the doorway of the study, watching V as he watched nothing. The mask had been focused on a point on the wall for several moments. She leaned against the door frame, smiling tenderly at his back. Even his posture expressed how deeply he was lost in thought. She couldn't blame him. The bits of information she had about the Fifth spoke of upcoming chaos. And he would be the director.
Evey had finished packing. She had taken an inordinate amount of time, making sure she had everything that might remind V of her. She wanted to be forgotten. Still, she was amazed by how little it all amounted to; she could fit their entire history into one bag.
'I'm leaving tomorrow,' she said softly. Across the room, V nodded without facing her. Her voice didn't surprise him. He could always tell the moment Evey entered a room.
'Yes. It is time, isn't it?' His tone was carefully controlled to sound mild; it infuriated her.
'Right,' she said shortly. 'I'll leave you to it, then.' She moved to leave. V finally turned to face her.
'I am not currently occupied,' he murmured. Evey stopped. For a moment, no one spoke. Then Evey walked to him, seating herself on a small couch near V's enormous desk. She could see her reflection clearly in the highly polished wooden surface. V folded his hands and looked at her.
She was still far too thin, as far as he was concerned. And she was still moving a bit gingerly, due to her shoulder. Recent activities had probably slowed down her recovery, he noted silently. Evey had circles under her large brown eyes.
But V thought she was beautiful. Perfect. Her shorn head accentuated the bones in her face, and the pale complexion of her skin. She had found a simply, short-sleeved white dress in one of the Gallery's closets. It hung modestly at her knees, managing to minimize how frail her legs looked. V thought she was perfect.
They sat for several minutes, simply looking at each other. Neither moved. Evey was trying to memorize every detail about V: the way his hair gleamed in the dull light, the controlled power in his stance, the way his clothes moved along his body, and the way the mask seemed to see her from every possible angle.
The silence began to weight down on them. Evey was desperately trying to figure out what she could possibly say to the man in front of her. For once, it was V who broke the silence.
'You have everything you require?' he asked. Evey stared at him for another moment.
'Yeah, I should be OK,' she replied. V nodded once, apparently satisfied. More silence.
'Do you want me to leave?' Evey blurted out suddenly, her voice seeming shrill to her own ears. V shook his head once, emphatically.
'Not at all,' he assured her. Evey gave him a weak smile.
'I meant the room.' She picked at the hem of her dress. V smiled behind the mask.
'As did I.' He started to speak again, then stopped.
V knew that if he did nothing, instigated nothing, she would leave without ever touching him again. No marks. No proof of the past few months. The weight of what would not be spoken nearly knocked the wind from his lungs. Without saying a word, or offering any sort of explanation, he carefully peeled off his gloves.