The Inch

A/N: Elflord: Good evening, London…good evening, my fellow readers. This is the voice of…of…Fate? Oh, dear me, no! This is the voice of --stands up on soapbox while cheesy dramatic rebellion music plays—REBELLION!

V: --shakes head and makes a tsk-ing noise from where he has noiselessly crept up behind a now rather frightened elf Are you ever going to stop making bad impressions of other people? If all the world's a stage, and all the rest is vaudeville…you just stepped on my lines.

Elford: -- --is embarrassed—

Yes, indeed…it seems that Elflord has been pulled into the vertigo of vigilant virtue found recently amongst the volume entitled V for Vendetta. The comic…that's right, some people still do read. I think, for my part, I wanted to answer a certain question in my mind after I read to the end: how is it possible that V did know about Evey's father? Aside from the well-publicized theory that V is in fact Evey's father (which, for various reasons that I really cannot articulate at this time, I simply do not believe), this is my answer. Agree or disagree, this is my theory, or at least what I believe the authors could have done to make it happen. Had to fudge around some details to even make the theory work, so actually…actually, my theory is impossible. Basically, I guess this is how the authors could have made it work, had they chose to do so. Please don't flame me because you don't like it. If you don't agree…tell me nicely. I don't react well when people are mean and nasty.

And finally…I don't own V for Vendetta. It belongs to Vertigo, and Dark Horse, and Alan Moore, and David Lloyd, and with the film, now Warner Brothers owns it also. But I don't own it. Don't sue me.

OH and one OTHER thing: this is COMICverse…not Movieverse. Just so you keep that one in mind.

England Prevails.

- - -

It had been perhaps days, perhaps months, perhaps years since she had gotten here. It was impossible to tell in this sunless world. Sitting bareheaded, barefooted, hungry, dirty on the floor of her tiny cell with four walls and a ceiling and a floor and a cot and two windows with six bars, she had tried with all her might to keep herself alive.

Perhaps days, perhaps months, perhaps years, she counted the bars, she counted the bricks, she counted the fleas on the rat that sometimes came to live in her cell.

With a little pencil that she had been able to hide up inside herself, she wrote her name.

'My name is Valerie Susan.' She wrote it over and over and over, on the floor beneath her cot where they would never be able to see. Every time she woke up, she wrote it again. If she could just keep writing it, she wouldn't forget. She wouldn't forget herself.

She wouldn't forget. She promised herself over and over and over that she wouldn't forget.

It was something they couldn't take away.

And yet, every day, she could feel herself slowly slipping. She didn't know how she knew, but she knew that they were dying: she knew that there was only a few of them left now. That was why they had been moved to these new cell blocks: because it was only them left.

Somehow, she knew it was the injection…she knew that strange things were happening in her body. She could feel the strange things happening, slowly but surely...she knew it was killing them.

She was frightened. Was she going to die too?

Perhaps that would be for the best. It was awful, terrible to think that way, but sometimes, she couldn't help it. Oh, Ruth…oh Ruth…she could still remember those perfectly beautiful roses Ruth had sent her on Valentines Day, almost six years ago. She could still remember Salt Flats…she could still remember the roses, those beautiful roses…she could remember the ambition, the passion, the need, the hunger…

But she also remembered the bad things. She remembered the outbreak of the war. She remembered being brought here. She remembered finding out who had told what she was and how they made her tell.

Oh, Ruth…poor, pitiable, sad Ruth, beloved Ruth. They had been victims. Everyone had been victims. They hadn't deserved this, Valerie knew that. She didn't blame Ruth for what she'd done. But how…how could she have been so selfish?

For now, she was all alone.

Desperately, over the days, perhaps weeks, perhaps months, perhaps years, she tried to convince herself that it wasn't true. She listened hard for breaks in the deadly silence that surrounded her, and sometimes, she imagined, dreamed, thought, was sure she heard things. Sometimes, she could hear someone or something moving about in Cell III. Sometimes, she could hear someone or something moving about in Cell V.

She was certain, so certain she could hear something or someone in Cell V…

One day, she stopped writing her name. Instead, she wrote something new.

"There is someone in cell III. There is someone in cell V. I am not alone. I love them." She wrote those words only once, and then she did not write them anymore. But through all the uncountable increments of time: between the meager meals, between the tortures, between being led to one mysterious place where they asked her question to which they had no answers and back with a blindfold in between, between those long, long, impenetrably long amounts of time where silence ruled the day or the night or whatever it was…she remembered those words…

'My name is Valerie Susan.' That was important to remember.

And then…

'There is someone in cell III. There is someone in cell V. I am not alone. I love them.' That…that was also important to remember.

Before Valerie had had her words, the cell had begun consuming her. All the time, she could feel the walls breaking in on her, coming closer, suffocating her. But with her words, she slowly began to push them back. The stones began to move back to the places they had come from. The walls were becoming just the walls again. They were not going to crush her.

There was something in her that these walls were not going to touch: one last inch of herself that was all her own and that nothing could take away.

And perhaps days, perhaps weeks, perhaps months, perhaps years, things went on this way. Until one time, when she woke up, there was not a rat in the hole in the wall. There was something else there: two pieces of toilet paper. Cautiously, being so desperately afraid that someone was going to see her, she went to the rat-hole and pulled them out. One was much longer than the other: nine sheets. The shorter one was four. On both of them were words, written in different hands. She looked at the names first.

She was not the only one who had somehow gotten a pencil. It had been terribly humiliating for her to do herself, although she had known it was something she must do. For men to do it, too…well, she couldn't imagine.

She didn't know how long it had actually taken for her to grant up the courage to read them. When she did, she began with the longer one. It began:

"I have no idea who you are. You have no idea who I am. Maybe you won't believe me. I don't blame you if you don't. But whoever you are, whether you believe or not, I must tell you everything. I tell you everything because in the end, I need to believe in the chance that at the end of this, there will be someone to tell it: someone to bear witness to what's happened, to what's become of us, of me. If I don't believe, I am already dead.

"I stole a pencil stub from those big garbage bins that used to be on the other side of the yard, back when we were allowed outside. It was on the ground on the other side of the fence. I could just get my fingers through the wire to get it, though I tore my hand to pieces doing it. I didn't mind: pain is irrelevant in such moments. I had to hide it. I am a man, so I guess I needn't go into detail of how I hid it.

"This is me. This is Arthur. I have to keep saying this is me, before I lose myself entirely. This is my story before I lose it, in case you are the one to live. I hope you do live. You could be the most loathsome person in the world, someone I would despise, but I find myself praying that you do live all the same. My god, please just live…

"I was born in 1950 in London. My family was part of the wealthy elite, and I was never in want. My parents gave me one of the finest educations that money could buy. I was schooled at the best schools: went to Eton. I sound arrogant, but I had a first-rate education. Eton boys could get to Oxford or Cambridge if they really wanted to then. Indeed, if I hadn't been so wrapped up in politics, I might have avoided coming here.

"One of the biggest problems with being liberal and being rich is that socialism and wealth sound like they contradict, because they do. When I was at Oxford and started quoting Marx, they nodded in agreement while behind their eyes, I could see only paternalistic scorn. When you're young, you don't understand. You are naïve and idealistic. You find yourself disgusted at your parents for preaching liberalism while they live materialistically, at professors for calling your philosophy a dream, at your peers, at the world. You rebel. You leave school two semesters before you've earned your BA, join the Socialist Party, all out of spite. You work a string of dead-end jobs for two years, your debts piling up, telling yourself that at least you're not like them...

"That idealism doesn't go on forever. In 1974, it suddenly occurred to me that while I might be a socialist, it wasn't worth martyrdom. I didn't go back to Oxford, but I was accepted at the London School of Economics and soon completed my BS in Political Science, and then my teaching credential. I went to work for a local secondary school in 1976, still working on my Masters in between.

"I met Anne the next year. She was my colleague: a biology teacher at the same school I taught at. Is it too much to say she was the most stunning creature, physically, intellectually, spiritually: stunning in every way a creature can be? How strangely men love…

"Anne was my wife. When we wed on March 30th, 1979, it was the happiest day of my life. Dear God, she was the most beautiful woman in the world. There must have been someone you have loved that no matter what they looked like, they were the most beautiful person in the entire world. She was my world.

"Evey was born on September 5th, 1981, 5:47 am. A minute later, I held her in my arms. Oh, dear god, my little Evey, so small and clean, so small and pure, so blessed…

"Are you a mother or a father? It is amazing, indescribable, how utterly your world changes in that moment, how one single being could become so utterly important to you.

"Thinking back, it is amazing how beautiful our life was. For seven years, so beautiful…

"War is a leech. It leeches life and all things living. In 1988, the war came. In a matter of a few weeks, half the world was bombed out of existence. London became a wasteland. Chaos reigned. There were riots in the streets. Nothing was safe anymore. Anne lay and cried herself to sleep so many nights. Sometimes, I cried, too. We didn't cry for ourselves. No, not for ourselves…we never let her hear us cry…

"My Evey couldn't play outside anymore.

"I say Anne was my wife. She held on for so long. She was so strong. She died on June 10th, 1991, while I was out searching for medicine to make her well again. She had been so ill, but so strong. I never got to say goodbye.

"My daughter needed me. I did not let her see her mother.

"Evey had her mother's strength. She stood by my side as the fascists marched into the streets, as decency and love fell apart on our ears, as they began taking people. She never abandoned me. Oh, my precious Evey…

"I was taken away on my daughter's birthday in 1992. Being socialist at any time was a crime, a crime which no one could plead innocent. They took me away from her. Now she will be alone. I will never forgive them.

"They have tortured me. They poured gallons of water down my throat and told me I would never see my daughter again. They have told me that they will do terrible things to her: rape her, kill her, and worse. I don't have the strength to remember it all. They have tried to convince me I did things I never did, things no moral person would do. They have not convinced me yet. I have admitted nothing yet. But I think I am slowly losing, submitting…

"They have drugged me. Strange things have begun happening to my body; frightening things. Sometimes, I see things that don't exist, hear sounds that aren't real. I know they aren't real; they can't be. My body is withering away. My hands and feet are like bones covered with skin. Fine, fluffy hair the color of tangerines is starting to grow under my fingernails, and my ears are slumping down my face. I feel weak and tired all the time. That was why I'm writing now: before I am too tired, before I lose everything I possess.

"I think about you often these days. I wonder what you look like: if you are old or young, black or white, a man or a woman. I wonder what your name is and why you're here. I think of you often. Your face has been a thousand faces to me. Each one is different, but each one has the same eyes: calm, tranquil eyes, a Buddha's eyes. Those eyes help me to sleep and to wake, to go on when there is nothing to go to. They are Anne's eyes, Evey's eyes.

"I wish I could see you. I wish I could hold you in my arms. I wish we could be together, beyond this wall, you and I, whoever you are. You do exist. You do. You do.

"You must live. I will die here: they will kill me. I know this. I don't mind: my life is irrelevant now. But I will not admit to their lies. I won't because if I do, I am already dead: dead in a way far more than my body can die. But you…you will live. You will live.

"My Evey is alive. She is. She is. She is alive today, and she is strong. She will live to see the sun again, someday. She will see the future, in beauty and love and everything. She will be loved; she will have babies of her own, someday. To her, these dark days will be a dream, someday. She will live and she will love. She will never EVER forget about love.

"I believe all of this with my very being: believe so much it must be true.

"I believe because if I don't, I am already dead.

"-Arthur Hammond"

For the longest time, she held it in her hands, hardly daring to believe it was real. It wasn't a piece of paper. It was a life. It was a person. It was something so precious that words were not fit to describe it. It was beautiful. Carefully, she pressed her lips to it. She imagined it was Arthur's face. With her own two arms, frail and so seemingly useless at her sides, she held her own body in an embrace, and she imagined that her two arms were Arthur's arms.

The walls seemed so far away, like nothing at all…

For the longest time, she sat like this with her eyes closed, dreaming Arthur was there. She sat until she suddenly realized…there was another letter. Carefully folding the precious note until it was small enough to hide in a little crevice behind her cot, a little crack in the wall; she picked up the shorter note and examined it. It was in a different hand, far more erratic, and far more halting… It was not Arthur's…how could that be? Cautiously, she began to read:

"I am a coward. Forgive me for being so selfish. Please listen before you condemn me. I need to repent, to confess. You are my only confidant now.

"Arthur was brave. I must be brave too. I waited too long: it is almost too late.

"My name is Lin. I am a Chinese man, and I am also homosexual. I never had a chance with the fascists. I was born in February of 1960. I do not know my exact birth date. I am an orphan: a refugee from the old People's Republic.

"It's funny…I wanted to write, like him. But I am not the same caliber of man Arthur was. I couldn't reach through the wire for fear of tearing my hands. But now, I, too, can bear the pain as irrelevant.

"One of my first memories is about an orange. It was hanging on a tree. It was summer in Britain, and the leaves were green. I was in the yard outside St. Bernadine's Heart Orphanage in Cambridge. I was four. Another boy pushed me off the tricycle, and I skinned my knee. I was crying.

"The tree was on the other side of the fence. I looked at it through the metal links, plump and juicy, hanging there. I did not want it, really, but I knew I could have it: it was something I could have if I only chose. I thought 'I could climb up there and pick that orange all for myself. I could show it to that mean boy. He will ask for a piece and I will say no. He will say sorry for pushing and will be nice and ask again. Then I will share. That's how I will make my first friend.'

"But I didn't climb the fence: I didn't try. It was high, and I was scared. I never climbed for the orange…until now.

"I don't have time to tell you about me. There is great pain inside me, terrible pain inside. It is my liver, I think. I will be dying soon. My strength is quickly failing, but as Arthur said, my life is irrelevant now. Only know that it was characterized by the easy road, the path of least resistance.

"When Arthur gave me his letter (I don't think it was so long ago) I was scared of what would happen. I was too afraid. I did not try to write him back. I'm sure he was waiting on me. How selfish and cowardly I was. But I would listen closely, listen all the time, making sure he was there. I read his letter over and over and over, wishing he was there with me. I wished I could hold him in my arms, too. I wished and wished and did not act.

"A few weeks ago, I heard noise, loud noise in cell II, Arthur's cell. I heard voices. I kept quiet and listened. This is what I heard:

"'Just sign it! You could live. Go back and sign it. You could get a job with the government. Go back…' It was a guard: you know that from the cadence of their voice, the violence in them. Those beasts…

"'Thank you…' that was Arthur's voice. 'But I'd rather die behind the chemical sheds.'

"I had never heard so much strength in a voice. I loved him, I loved him so much. I have never cried for anyone before I cried for him. Suddenly, everything in his letter became mine. I heard them leave his cell, walking away. It was not long before the dull sound of a bullet told me that Arthur never stopped believing.

"I cannot do what Arthur asked. He asked me to live to tell his story, our story, but I will not live long enough to tell it. My liver is dying…I can feel it. I was sorry I could not do it. I lost hope.

"Then I remembered you.

"It took a long time to get the pencil, but I was able to sneak one with my toes off a nurse's clipboard while she was a moment inattentive. It was hard, but I was able to do it without her noticing. I did it.

"I got the orange.

"It is wrong of me to ask you to do what I had no personal strength to do. I hate to burden you. I've never met you, and already I'm a burden. But I need to ask you, beg you… please live. Live for Arthur and Evey and Anne. Live for these people I have never met but already love. Live for everything in that letter: for beauty and happiness, for love…for tomorrow. Whatever you live for, live.

"Oranges are never too high to climb for. I didn't know that until it was almost too late. But you can climb. I believe that.

"Please don't stop climbing. Ever.

-Lin"

The letter was short. It was too short. She wished there was more. It was not so strong as Arthur's letter. It was by someone scared and weak. But it was still someone: it was someone giving themselves to her, for the first time unafraid. It was still a purpose. It was still so precious in her hands.

She loved them. She loved both of them. She loved Arthur, who was dead. She loved Lin, who was dying.

All that day, she listened very carefully to the wall. In it, she could hear him breathing: a very weak breath, but still breath. She heard him coughing, fighting, and it felt so strange to smile at that. Lin was fighting. But as the night wore on, she listened as the breath grew softer and softer. Still fighting…but softer…softer…

She wished she could hold him in her arms before he went away. She wished she could kiss him. Though she fought to stay awake, to keep on listening, she did fall asleep.

When she woke up again, there was no more breathing.

Valerie pressed her lips to the wall, murmuring her last farewells to her short-lived friend. She would not stop climbing, not stop believing. She promised him that.

Perhaps days, perhaps weeks, perhaps months, perhaps years went by. Every day, she read the letters over and over. Every day, she read the words she had etched beneath her cot. Every day, she listened on the other side of the wall. She could hear someone in there. More than any of all the rest, that fact kept the walls from swallowing her: knowing that there was someone there, that she was not the last one left alive, that she was not alone.

Perhaps days, perhaps weeks, perhaps months, perhaps years went by.

But…

One day, Valerie woke up and she could not move her tongue.

Strange things were happening to her body: strange things that had killed Lin and Arthur. It wouldn't be too much longer…

But room V…room V…

In the end, Lin had been wrong, she decided as she began to write. He was not so much a coward as he had said. In the end, he had climbed for his orange, though it was with his toes and far too late, and he got it, even if he tore his hands to pieces. Now, it was time for her to climb.

It took a long time for her to finish writing. It was harder than she could have imagined, and there were times when she couldn't help but cry. There were times when she wanted to stop, stop climbing. But she thought about everything that had become important to her since she had been in this room, about everything that she could promise to this stranger on the other side, and pushed her hands through the wire.

When she was finished with her letter, she sent it along through the hole, with the other two letters. She wouldn't really be needing them anymore.

Even if she did, the person in room V needed them so much more.

Death was irrelevant. Death could not touch her: not the last inch of her.

----

Sitting bareheaded, barefooted, hungry, dirty on the floor of her tiny cell with four walls and a ceiling and a floor and a cot and two windows with six bars, a man stared at the wall. His face was very ugly, but his eyes shone with a strange light. When all others eyes had dimmed and darkened, as days, perhaps weeks, perhaps months had gone by, his eyes had sharpened in a strange, maddening way. When all others bodies had grown weak, as days, perhaps weeks, perhaps months had gone by, his body had not degenerated. If anything, he looked like he was quite strong.

And yet, his sanity was not so strong…

For days, perhaps weeks, perhaps months, he had sat like this. He sat like a great, mad philosopher, like some psychotic criminal, leering over folded hands at some great and vicious things in the future: terrible things, vindictive things… just things, horribly just things.

And yet, behind his bright, shining, strangely magnetic eyes, they were eyes full of sorrow…eyes full of rage…eyes full of pain.

He could not remember. He tried with all his might and strength of mind to remember anything about himself, anything about himself that would make this world of ceiling and floor and four walls alive with something. But he could not remember. Why couldn't he remember?

Why couldn't he remember? What was his name? How old was he? Where was he born? When was he born? Had he had a family, or had he been a orphan? Had someone loved him? Day in and day out, he had tried to delve into his memory, but the further he dove into the waters there, the more he found the ocean floor empty.

He had not had an inch within himself to hold onto. So he had found another inch outside himself.

All around him, in great mounds, ammonia-based fertilizers were piled. In drooling, slovenly rivers, the grease solvent connected the mounds, circling him around him in spirals and wild curlicues. For hours, he could sit and examine them: the random, seemingly senseless design…and yet, he knew that it was not. There was a pattern evolving, but he could not yet decipher it yet. A pattern was being channeled through him, but he knew not for what purpose. When he was not allowed out in the gardens to work with his hands in the earth, with the plants, with living things, he would spend the hours arranging these piles around his cell. He would sit for hours, watching them, examining them, searching for their secrets. He would do this, he had done this, for perhaps days, perhaps weeks, perhaps months, perhaps years.

But not today.

Today, his eyes did not shine in that strangely psychotic, strangely magnetic way.

Today, for the first time he could ever remember, his eyes were filled with tears.

In his hands, there were three rolls of toilet paper. Three lives were in his hands. Or to be more accurate…two deaths and an ending life…

Three people loved him. He loved three people. Two of them were dead: two good men were dead. One more, it broke his heart, was dying.

Oh Valerie…why did he love her so much? Was it because they were the two that were left alive now? Was it because she had showed him a world of memories he could no longer remember for himself?

Was it because she loved roses?

The hand that lay at his side, the hand that did not hold this precious letter, suddenly clenched in a feeling he knew only to call rage. Why weren't there any more roses? Why? Why couldn't Valerie have a single rose, not even one…surely a woman like her deserved it! Surely a woman like her…

Surely a woman like her, a beautiful woman like her…surely a woman like Valerie did not deserve to die.

No one deserved it…no one deserved to die.

A single tear fell to the dirt floor, making it wet.

It was suddenly becoming clear what his final project in the garden would be, and what the evolving pattern was starting to mean.

Roses…he would grow roses for Valerie. She would never see them, she would never have them, she would never even know they were growing…but they would be for her. They would be for her strength, her compassion, her beauty…her heart.

They would be for the inch within her that they could never take away: the inch she had given him.

And the pattern on the floor, he thought with an maddening glitter in his eyes, the pattern on the floor…

It was a pattern for revenge. It was a pattern for rage. It was a pattern for fire raining down from the sky, for the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, for justice served to the unjust, for breaking down the walls, for…

For freedom.

The pattern that had been channeled through him was the pattern for freedom.

He remembered them all. For once, he remembered. When he stayed for hours in the gardens, tending to the roses, he remembered them. He remembered Arthur and Anne and Evey, he remembered Lin…but most of all he remembered her. It was these times that he mourned, and his sorrow was channeled into their beauty. But when he stayed in his cell, carefully calculating and creating and surmising his escape, he knew he was channeling his rage.

But still he remembered. He remembered every day, because it was all he could remember. He remembered even on the night that, under a volatile, hellfire sky, naked beyond the flames, beyond the destruction, beyond his hatred, he howled like an anguished animal at the night sky and ran for humanity, for vengeance, for justice…

For freedom.

He remembered even in that moment to bring three tiny strips of toilet paper clutched tightly in his hand.

----

Four years later, a man in a mask sat before a mirror. The mirror had been his enemy and his only friend for four years…

Before Evey.

In front of him were three photographs. One depicted a man with wildly curly, reddish brown hair and a pair of glasses, a large mouth and large teeth smiling carefree and joyous at the camera. He was standing outside his small, humble home with his wife at his arm and a little girl at his feet. The woman next to him was blonde and fair-looking, grinning good-naturedly, and the child…the child was simply beautiful.

The next photograph depicted a slight, feminine, almost elfin man with silky black hair that fell to his shoulders and dark, slanted eyes, his skin a beautiful shade of tan, smiling conservatively but contentedly in the arms of his lover.

And the last photograph…

The last photograph was of a woman: a beautiful woman on stage. It was the woman beyond description to him: a woman who had colored all his dreams and haunted all his days for four long, lonesome years. Though he had never seen her in life, never hugged her, or kissed her, or cried with her, or got drunk with her, he swore he could imagine her and what it would have been like to give her even one last rose.

He loved her.

Most nights, when he came here to sit with these three people who had reached out to touch him, to save him, he would often find himself focusing on her picture, dreaming of her, speaking to her, loving her, while the other two were ignored. But tonight, he found himself drawn to the photograph of the man with glasses, of his family, his child…

He remembered the last paragraph in this man's letter:

My Evey is alive. She is. She is. She is alive today, and she is strong. She will live to see the sun again, someday. She will see the future, in beauty and love and everything. She will be loved; she will have babies of her own, someday. To her, these dark days will be a dream, someday. She will live and she will love. She will never EVER forget about love.

Somewhere in the Shadow Gallery, somewhere amongst books and artwork and music and this great cave of forgotten culture, Evey Hammond was sleeping. She was dreaming of her father; somehow he knew this. The man in the mask In some ways, she was the same Evey Hammond that was playing happily at her parents' feet in this picture. And yet, she was a radically different woman, after V had freed her from her prison… after what he'd had to do to her to free her.

Had he had the right? Had he had the right to free her?

Even after she had been imbibed with his own personal hatred…would she still remember love? Would she have sun and beauty and love and a future, someday? Would she live and love?

Would she never EVER forget about love?

Somewhere in the Shadow Gallery, somewhere amongst books and artwork and music and this great cave of forgotten culture…Evey Hammond was sleeping.

"Arthur," he felt more than heard himself whisper, "Oh Arthur…dear God, please be right. Dear God…I pray you are right."

He prayed for the last inch.

FINITO

A/N: Whew! Dear God, that was long and hard. Nearly took everything out of me writing that one, and if I have to reference that comic book for a specific detail just one more time, I think I'm gonna need to blow up New Old Bailey. Anywho…please review. I need reviews, and I really haven't been getting them lately. Not exactly sure why...I think I've been turning out top notch work I've been putting a lot of effort into. Anyway...yeah...if I don't get appreciated, I may learn to frequent another site... hope this will inspire someone to review.