Title:
Deliverance
Author:
kenzimone
Disclaimer:
I don't own.
Fandom:
V For Vendetta
Rating:
G
Summary:
Her name was Valerie. (V/Valerie)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
He loved her in spite of – or perhaps because – his love would never be returned. In silence he loved her, in darkness and cold; for he had never seen her face, and the only touch he'd ever received was the cool kiss of stone as he rested his face against it and closed his eyes.
She would talk aloud to the walls around her, and sometimes she would sing; it was her songs about the sea and blue skies that lulled him to sleep at night when the pain was at its worst, the light lilt to her voice bringing him back to Before, though he could not remember anything of it.
With time her words became more strained, and the nights when she would sing became few and far inbetween. Instead she spoke aloud to the stones surrounding her, spoke of her love and her hopes and her dreams. Again and again, the same words, and it was only later that he realized that what man fears the most is not to simply fade away, but to fade away into obscurity.
Then the night of the fire was upon them, and the heat burnt his skin; it should have been impossible, but the flames hurt more than any of the tears he'd ever heard her shed. The door to her cell remained closed and locked, even after he himself had broken free, and would not be forced open; she remained inside as he stumbled through the inferno, and later he would find solace in how he never heard the sound of her strained voice in the intermingling screams of the others.
Oh so many years later, and this girl stands before him. She tells him it would not seem right to keep the note, seeing as he himself wrote it, and he says that no, no he didn't. He didn't write it. And it is not much of a lie, because the handwriting is not hers, and the paper is new and unblemished; but the words are from her lips, as he remembers them being spoken time upon time again in the darkness, a beacon of hope, sentences and paragraphs forever imprinted in his mind and in his soul.
And it is fitting, he thinks, that her life and her last desperate attempt to be remembered would deliver not only this young girl, but save them all.
