NOBODY SPECIAL
Author's Note: I wrote this little one-shot simply because of one panel in the graphic novel that never made it to the movie (I wonder if it's obvious which one?), but what I've ended up with is a weird blend of movie-verse and comic-verse.
Disclaimer: V for Vendetta created by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. I make no claim to own the characters and am making no money from this. It's purely done out of love.
Putting on his clothes feels like a betrayal.
It shouldn't do: I know in my heart that this is what he wanted, this is what he intended for me all along - but my fingers are shaking as I button the tunic and it isn't through fear.
Not any more.
This tunic smells of him, or rather the odd non-smell of him. He wasn't a man who wore aftershave or cologne, and whatever he washed the wigs in smelt of nothing more than clean soap and water. And yet still I would know the scent of him from a thousand others, I've been around him that long.
I am not crying anymore as I finish fastening the black fabric over my thin body, a body that has grown through torment and starvation into strength under his care. But I inhale the scent of his clothes as I pick out a cloak from the rack of ten other identical cloaks, and it almost makes my chest ache.
I have to concentrate, remember that these are my clothes now. His gift to me, and it would be so much more than churlish to waste it or turn away from it in tears.
It would be a travesty, a rejection not just of everything he has given me, but of himself, and there is no time now to change my mind.
I take the mask from where it hangs by its strap on the peg and turn it in my hands so that it faces me. If I was going to cry again, it would be now as I look down into - and through - the eye slits, creased in V's eternal frozen smile. I trace the rims of the eye sockets on the inside of the mask with my fingertips, feeling the carefully smooth edges.
I must not forget the gloves. My fingers poke up through the empty holes grotesquely, stained a dark reddish brown. V's blood. Suddenly I want the gloves more than ever. Is this why you wore them, V? The blood on your hands not a sight you wanted to see either?
It's a question I suddenly would give anything for him to answer, even if it were one of his wandering, literary answers that could take me weeks to decipher, and by the time I figured it out I'd have forgotten what I originally asked. And it's then that it hits me properly, for the second time, a second wave, following the first that swamped me when I held his shuddering, dying body in my arms and felt the stickiness of his blood seeping out from his wounds and into my own clothes that now lie in a pile on the floor at my feet. The loss. The guilt.
Oh, god, V, I wish you weren't dead.
I could wish so many things. I could wish you hadn't gone out that final time, I could wish I'd never met you, that you'd never saved me from the Fingermen all that time ago. I could wish all these things and more, but all my wishes would make no difference. You knew this was coming. What brought you to die in this place tonight went far beyond me and you, didn't it? It started long before I was even born and is so big it makes me feel like a tiny tadpole in a jam jar, caught and isolated at the edge of a lake full of big, lurking fish.
You would have died whether I was there to hold you or not.
My only consolation is that at least you didn't die alone.
This is where, if he were alive, he'd be lecturing me on how his identity transcends the mere physicality of his body. But he's dead and somehow I can't bring myself to focus on higher ideals.
At least, not yet. I have one thing to do first. One thing that you wouldn't have had, V, if you'd died alone.
I lift the mask to my face and inhale the one scent of him I never got to smell when he was alive, and then I fasten the straps behind my head. In the dark surrounds of the mask I suddenly regain my calm, my centre, and I pick up the wig almost without thinking, my hands moving automatically to pull it into place.
When I next look in the mirror V looks back at me and instead of feeling the ache of loss I expected, I feel my hidden mouth curling into a smile to match the gently grinning expression of the mask. This mask has at times seemed threatening, loving, lecturing, devilish and angelic - but now its expression makes me feel like when I was small and my mother would tell me, "Very good, Evey! Well done!" .
"There you are," I say, "there you are. And there you were all along."
Except I don't say that. I silently sweep the longer, shining length of dark hair into place with a flick of my hand, then pull on the gloves to cover the bloodstains, brush down the long boots fastidiously as I've seen him do a thousand times.
"I know how to do all this," I tell V, my reflection, "because you taught me more than Shakespeare and strength. Every day I stayed you taught me about being you, whether you knew it or not. And being you isn't just about revenge. It isn't just about justice."
Except I don't say that, either. There isn't time. I turn and walk back to where I left him lying, broken body slowly leaking blood onto the floor, mask smiling amid the spill of hair. If anyone was watching, now, how strange this would seem. The terrorist known as V bends to the side of his fallen twin. Tenderly, but not without effort, scoops him up in his arms. Begins to carry him toward the waiting train.
It's at this point that I realise he must have known. He is a heavy weight, all that agile muscle slack and cumbersome in death. If I had not been prepared, it would have been an undignified dragging affair to take him to the bier he had so carefully made ready to receive him. And that would have been wrong, V: no-one deserves dignity more than you.
Hail and farewell, my friend, my love. As I step out into the night and realise that I don't feel the chill of the November air through the tough cloth and the shining mask, I am focussed, centred, just like you. The glare of the explosion and the fireworks flares through the slits of the eyes, and I raise my voice, raise the microphone to speak to the crowds below, knowing that I don't sound like him but that no-one, no-one will notice. Wearing his clothes no longer feels like a betrayal.
It feels like a celebration.