AUTHOR'S NOTE: My first V For Vendetta fic, published to great success in Vigilante, the original V for Vendetta fanfic archive.

The title comes from a philosophical idea that the personalities of people could be tied to the 'humours' of the body. People who possessed such personality qualities were said to have an excess of the humour to which the personality was tied, and sometimes strange medical procedures would be undertaken to liberate the individual from the humours that affected their moods.

Melancholic, meaning "black bile", means a person was prone to depressed moods and tended to have a black outlook on life.

xXx

The Shadow Gallery stood long and still, her paintings strangely empty of life, the figures with rouged cheeks and bared breasts offering no comfort to him. Even the jukebox, the crooners and sirens could not quiet his soul. The first and now the second of November had come and gone, and he felt his death drawing ever nearer. One expects an air of melancholy when one is contemplating less than seventy-two hours until death, but melancholy was not the word. V's mind swam in a bottomless abyss.

Though he had exacted a promise from her, she had not come; her step had not darkened (or was it lightened?) his door since those days when he had kept her imprisoned, shaved and naked of femininity, though he could not blame her. It had been the only way, hadn't it? Of course it had, he told himself. Of course it had. After all, she had emerged from the ordeal a different person, indestructible. Oh, how he had shaken her, but she had held out, fighting him until the last. And when it was 'over', when he had freed her, she had left him.

He held his head in his hands, his leather gloves sliding over his mask. Of course she would, he knew. How could he expect a young, beautiful woman to stay here in his pit of vengeance? How could he expect a young, beautiful woman to love this… creature behind his mask? How, indeed.

So he stood up from his chair, putting his sword away and gave the armor back his head. He had killed his opponent three times in as many days, dancing with the sword, both dreaming of his revenge, and ignoring the fact she wasn't there. It had rained today, though the sounds had not reached his ears. He could smell the moisture in the earth, feel the damp in his bones, and it reminded him again of her absence. God is in the rain. He walked to Valerie's corner of the gallery. Her poster smiled coyly at him, her face, ageless and beautiful. He both loved and despised her. Loved her for her beauty, her strength, and despised her for leaving him.

V remembered when she slid the scroll into his cell, that rat-hole their small but concrete defiance. He had read it hungrily, eager for human contact in that pit. How is it that she could remember her life and he could not? He envied her the roses, the Scarlet Carsons whose smell he could not fabricate in his mind, although he was sure they would have smelled sweet. When he was bone-weary from their tests and their needles, the heady scent of his imagined roses became his escape. One day, he had vowed, such roses, such sweet scents would compliment the smell of blood and steel when he killed the people who did this to him.

And so he had. He had planned for years, stealing what he needed, lifting what he wanted. The things of beauty he 'acquired' from the Objectionable Material vaults surrounded him. He lived as he wanted, only his books and the jukebox for company.

And then she came, walking into his life with a can of mace. "Are you like a crazy person?" she asked him. Oh, if only she knew!

But she would not. She had not come, and he knew she would not. He was alone, as he was in the beginning, but it was not the same.