Author's Note: A little drabble to tide you over until Saturday when AP testing is over and I can figure out the next chapter of VV. Sorry for the long wait on updates.
Silence
V does not talk to himself. Ever.
It started during his time at Larkhill, or at least that is the earliest he can remember feeling the compulsion. The earliest he can remember anything, really. His second birth.
Sitting in the pungent cell, his back to the hardness of the wall, he'd felt the urge to say his own name, though even that had become too abstract for him to remember. Instead he'd clamped his mouth shut, biting his tongue until he could taste the metallic tang of blood, the one bit of flavor his fragmented memory now knew.
To speak the ephemeral concepts which float constantly through his mind aloud would somehow be too close to an admission of the madness others love to brand him with. And so he has set the line at speaking, two decades before Evey ever came into his life.
It accounts for his constant love of music, his propensity for humming, whistling, tapping out a rhythm on whatever surface is nearest. He has to have the noise to keep the words at bay.
"Do you ever get tired of it?" asks Evey one morning.
"What?" V thinks she could mean any one of the oddities that form his daily routine.
"The noise. There's always a noise down here. The jukebox, or the telly's on, or you're playing your piano." She is in one of her stubborn moods, the kind where she always manages to get the answers she wants out of him.
"Silence is the virtue of fools,"1 says V.
"You know what I think?" asks Evey, tipping her chin up in defiance. "I think you're afraid of it."
V freezes, taken aback. After all the measures he's taken to hide, she's seen straight through him more completely than she even knows.
"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood,"2 he says.
"Sometimes I could just punch you," says Evey. She turns and flounces off in that little girl way of hers.
"Evey—" says V. But he stops. Because she is out of the room.
Because once she is gone, there is no one to hear.
1 Sir Francis Bacon
2 Marie Curie
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