Of light and Cloud Shadow
A "V for Vendetta" short story by Tina Price.
Preview: V's life was forever changed the night he brought an unconscious Evey Hammond down to his home. Little had he realized that they would ultimately change each other's life... for the better.
Disclaimer: V for Vendetta and all characters therein are the property of Warner Brothers Entertainment Company and DC Comics.
Authors note: This story is rated R. Criticism and advice are always appreciated!
Chapter Two: What Lies Beneath
With a sense of security that she hadn't felt since leaving the shadow gallery, Evey curled up in her bed. And it was her bed – hers alone. She had managed to track down the right person, obtain a new ID and procure work in one of the backstreet markets where she wouldn't really attract any attention.
As for her flat; she had lucked out. Her employer owned the building and had turned the two room place over to her when its previous tenant seemed unlikely ever to return after having being detained.
As she lay there under the covers, she thought back yet again on time she had shared with the mysterious man known only as V. Once again her thoughts drifted back to a turning point they had shared and which had led to the heartbreak she now experienced.
V often disappeared at odd hours and was gone for periods from several hours to even a day or two. There was never any rhyme or reason to it that she could decipher. He was a force, like the wind and kept his own time. Perhaps it was that time no longer held any meaning for him? She knew he slept but never had a clue as to when.
On the night in question he had been gone far longer than his usual, for a full three days in fact. Her only warning that it would be some time before he returned had been a note found on the kitchen table informing her of her food choices for the next few days and apologizing for having to be away a while.
The time alone had been both grueling and enlightening. She had first experienced a numb loneliness which left her wandering through the gallery with absolutely no idea what to do with herself. Her attempt to kill time by watching TV had ended after several hours because of her disgust at the propaganda spouted by every single show. She had then cooked a meal, watched a movie and gone to bed.
A few hours later she was up again and just as bored as earlier. That was when she began to wonder what it must have been like for him all these years. Did he start off feeling as lost as she now was? Had he spend much of his time collecting the art that now filled the gallery before turning to his plan or had he pursued both at once? What about the books; when had he begun to collect them and how?
It was then then that a thought of some adventure came to her. After all, V was gone for a time... why shouldn't she truly explore his home? If there were any places he did not wish her to be then he would have locked them up, right?
"Now then," she asked herself. "where do you sleep?" In truth she had no clue. She had quickly come to realize that the room she slept in had not been a mere storage room, but his bedroom. The bed that was now hers had to have been his.
The night he carried her down here, unconscious, he would not have had time to place sheets on an unused bed before laying her on it. And when she had awakened, she had been aware that the sheets beneath her had been hastily straightened, that someone had recently been sleeping there. Then later, after fleeing back to the room in terror and grief, she had discovered a set of clean sheets had been placed thoughtfully upon one of the book stacks.
Since that night, the bed and the room had remained hers. He slept elsewhere, but where?
She knew of only four doors in the shadow gallery. One was the way in and out of the subterranean lair. She already knew that there were no rooms off that passage which he could be using.
The second door was always locked, even now, but rarely had she see him venture through it, so you discounted it as a possibility for now.
The third door led to the fake detention center he had constructed. For what purpose had he created it before she had unwittingly become a prisoner there, she shuddered to think on.
Before she had become his "detainee" the door had always been locked. The one time she had tested it since recovering from the ordeal, she had found it open. She supposed she would eventually have to venture there and confront those unpleasant memories, but she didn't relish that one bit.
The last door led to the crude bathroom V had fashioned out of a small alcove off to the side of his makeup area. It contained a very small tub with a shower, a sink, a lo and barely room to stand between them.
When she had first been his "guest" Evey had taken every opportunity to scour the room for evidence she might use as a cue to his true appearance. A hair, skin, an eyelash... she looked for anything at all in the tub, sink and on the floor. To her immense frustration, never had she found a thing. It was as though he had anticipated this and taken meticulous care to remove all traces of himself before leaving the room.
Something else had bothered her about it as well... and now it clicked as significant. V's appearance was as tidy and meticulous as any of his undertakings. His clothes were always clean, neatly pressed and carefully inspected for the slightest bit of imaginary dust or lint. V himself never smelled anything other than fresh. And here is where the puzzle came together for her: V, as far as she could tell, never seemed to shower in their common bathroom.
She had thought right up until now that perhaps he did so while she slept, yet never had she awakened to hear the water running... and she certainly had become a light sleeper these days.
So what if he really had never showered in there while she lived with him?
What if he showered elsewhere... for instance, in the delousing room of the detainment area?
With her heart pounding in her throat she pushed open the large wooden door which led to the phony facility.
She hated this place, loathed what it represented both to her and to the man she tried so hard to understand. He had tortured her here, had given her back her life, but also severely damaged her ability to trust him.. or trust his sense of judgment anyway. And he...
Had he tortured others here? Had he used this "set" in which to interrogate those who stood between him and his sense of justice? Or had he created this place while she had been living with Gordan for the express purpose of "setting her free"?
It was all too much for her to think on now, making her shake with both anger and anxiety. Soon, perhaps, she would confront him and make her explain it to her. Until then, she just didn't want to go there.
Moving down the long, gray corridor she felt a sort of depression settle upon her and shivered as memories came rushing back. Once again she felt herself being dragged down this hallway by the scruff of her neck, steely hands gripping the collar of her rough gown and nearly throttling her while returning her to her cell.
The cell was down a hallway which opened on her right.
She hurried past that corridor to a doorway just on the other side, then pushing open the door, she stepped over the threshold.
The delousing room, it had been known as. It was a square, white tiled room with a drain in the center of the floor and a one-way mirror on one wall. There in was a pipe coming out of the wall and attached to a long hose which ended in a power jet wand. Against the wall was a bucket, the one he had filled with a smelly, medicinal scented substance he would douse her with.
It was in this room that some of the worse humiliations had been visited upon her by a thug named Rossiter. Or at least, that was what she had believed at the time. To have found out in the end that it had been V himself... had been almost too painful to take. It had completed her humiliation, made it far worse than she ever would have thought possible. And it was this part of her ordeal which had left her spewing venom at him.
"You're sick! You're evil!" she had spat as she realized the scope of his betrayal. Yet there he had stood, in his impeccable outfit, smoothing it down and acting unconcerned while she came to terms with the fact that he had done such things to her!
Even now, the memories came flooding back and a sob escaped her as she remembered being "processed".
He had literally torn her clothes off her, then hung her on a hook by her bound wrists. Next came the pressure washing as he verbally humiliated her. He had called her a filthy cow... and that was the nicest thing he had said as he took his time in hosing her down. Every inch of her, even her most private areas, had been scoured by the forceful spray until she could do nothing more than cry out in pain. Finally, when she couldn't even cry anymore, so raw was her throat, he had taken her off the hook, pulled a rough garment over her, shaved her scalp and thrown her into a dark, cold cell.
She had spent the remainder of the night in a huddle in the corner, shivering and half out of her mind with pain and fear.
The daily torture had begun the following morning: cigarette burns, sleep deprivation, near drownings... but his favored torture involved the so-called routine delousings.
Had it aroused him sexually? Had he stood in this very room and enjoyed doing that to her? Tears tracked down her face at the thought of it and she realized that despite her feelings for him, that she hadn't even begun to come to terms with what he had done.
She wanted an explanation, she wanted an apology... she wanted to know the sordid truth of what had been going through his mind but she doubted she would ever have the courage to bring it up.
Shaking her head, she wiped furiously at her eyes, dashing the tears away. She had come here with a purpose and would not give in to any more self pity. And as she stood there and confronted this near past he had created for her, her fear and horror faded away to be replaced instead by a mix of both anger and sadness.
Then a calmness settled over her as she faced the memories and gained mastery over them. Reminding herself of why she was here, she began to play the detective and again perused the room.
The power washer had been hung on the hook which had formerly held her bound wrists and fashioned into a usable shower, which meant that her assumption was right:
This was where V cleaned up.
Squatting down near the jury-rigged shower, she began to inspect the tile floor... and was elated when her search was almost immediately rewarded. Holding her breath, still afraid to believe that what she was seeing was real, she extended her hand and carefully ran her finger over the single hair she had found. It stuck to her and she was able to tease it from the tile, bringing her thumb into play to secure it.
"Oh my God..." she breathed, holding it up to the light.
The hair was straight, medium brown and about two centimeters long. It wasn't hers and as there was little chance that anyone other than V had been recently using this shower...
"It's his," she gasped. "It's a piece of him."
So now she knew something about the man beneath the mask; nothing of much consequence but something nonetheless. He had at least some hair and that hair was was a brown color.
How strange to be reminded that the hair she had come to think of as his was but a black wig. How bizarre to have the man and the symbol separate even a little in her mind. If so small a thing as his seeing this one hair and discovering his hair color could be so disorienting, then might it not prove to be too much if she ever glimpsed the man himself?
She shook her head. He was who he was. Although she might be startled, shocked, or even horrified by the real man, he would still remain as familiar and unchanged to her as her own reflection.
Again she contemplated the hair she held between her fingers. Should she keep it to remind herself that he was, when all was said and done, only human in the end? She sighed and let the hair fall to the tiles below. There was no point, for a part of him would always be far more than human, would always be the symbol known a V.
And another part of him, which he tried to keep hidden, was a man...
Evey was keenly aware of that every time he was anywhere in her vicinity. He was a mix of every dangerous thing under the sun. Add to that his rich, eloquent voice and you had a surefire recipe for enticing female desire.
With a sigh and a last look around, Evey left V's shower room and turned back down the passage lined with detention cells.
The first door on her right was labeled as a storage room, but upon careful inspection she discovered that the door was false. There really was no room; it was merely a cleverly covered part of the wall.
The first door on her left was the interrogation room. This was a room she knew to be real and which, during her detainment, she had dreaded visiting almost as much as the delousing room.
Reaching for the door knob she was surprised to find it locked.
Why would he leave this entire false detainment center unlocked, yet take the precaution of locking this one door? All at once she knew that she had to get inside that room. Whatever he was hiding in there, it was something she must uncover.
It took her only seconds to determine the best way to bypass the lock… and she quickly backtracked and entered the shower room. Picking up the heavy, metal bucket from its place on the floor, she swung it full force into the one-way mirror. With a crash, the glass exploded outward, leaving a very satisfying layer of shards on the desk and floor beyond.
The destruction of that one small part of this false place proved exhilarating to her, leaving her with an adrenaline rush which made her feel as though she could do anything.
Was that how he felt when he fought the corrupt, the guilty, and the government itself?
Shaking away the thought, she used the bucket as a step stool and after carefully removing the last glass shards from the bottom of the wall frame, levered herself over it. Once on the other side, she paused to allow her eyes to adjust to the darker room as she scanned the gloom around her.
There was something sitting on the desk.
She moved forward to investigate and then froze, her heart leaping painfully into her throat.
V was standing in the corner watching her!
Shocked, all she could do was stare… until she realized what she was really seeing. With a sigh of relief, she gingerly made her way across the glass-covered floor and flipped on the lights.
In the corner, on a hat stand, were V's cloak, mask and hat. He had arranged them, for some reason all his own, so that he himself almost seemed to be lurking in the shadows. Even his boots were there, peaking out from under the edge of the cloak.
Tearing her eyes away from the sight, Evey finally investigated a neat pile of clothing on the desk. Carefully, she lifted one item after another, taking stock of them; his jacket, britches and shirt lay atop his socks and underwear. Every item was in black or gray.
With a blush she realized that his boxers were made of fine, gray-colored silk, and somehow it seemed to fit in with his personality.
At the bottom of the pile were a fresh towel and a bar of soap. Maybe he didn't have enough hair to warrant the use of shampoo, but then again maybe he either wasn't going to wash his hair, or he was going to use soap instead. She shrugged; no useful information there.
Giving the room one more once over and not finding anything else of interest, she made to leave but found that the door was locked on this side as well, dead bolted, apparently.
"Damn," she breathed. She would have to climb back out the way she came in and with the bucket still on the floor on the other side, a chair would now have to serve as her step stool.
Yanking the chair form the desk, she positioned it beneath the hole in the wall and prepared to make her escape. It was as she was swinging one leg up and over the now empty mirror frame that the chair suddenly slid backwards. The fine, broken glass shards on the floor had destroyed a good deal of the traction it might otherwise have had.
Evey was pitched forward. For a brief second, as her shoulder hit the side of the mirror frame, she thought she would be able to keep her balance, but the sudden pain in her shoulder distracted her just enough to slow her reflexes. She ducked her head and managed to flip as she tumbled forward, landing hard upon her back in the shower room.
Stunned, she lay there for a moment and forced herself to take a breath. Aside from the intense pain in her shoulder, and the certainty that her back was bruised, she seemed none the worse for wear.
It was only when she was back on her feet that she knew that she hadn't been so fortunate after all.
There was blood on the mirror frame and on the floor where she had landed.
She clutched at her left shoulder only to have her hand come away covered with blood. The pain blossomed horridly when a second check uncovered a deep laceration on the back of her shoulder, in a hard to reach spot.
Close inspection of the window frame revealed a small, but nasty sliver of glass still held in place right where her shoulder had struck the opening.
A wave of dizziness overtook her as she realized that she was bleeding heavily enough to leave large splatters on the tile floor. How would she be able to tend her own wound when she could barely even reach it?
Evey forced herself to take a few deep, slow breaths. It was enough to focus her on what she had to do first: stop the bleeding.
Carefully, she pulled her T-shirt up over her head, then used a glass shard from the floor to put a tear into it. Stepping on one end she then pulled the other, effectively ripping a thick strip from the bottom. Using the wall as an assist to her free hand, she balled up the shirt, positioned it over her wound and then wrapped the strip of shirt around it. She was able to tie it tightly by using both hands and assisting with her teeth.
There. It seemed to be a pretty good pressure bandage if she did say so herself. But now what? Again her thoughts turned back to her purpose in being here. There was no point in rushing right back to the Shadow Gallery to disinfect her shoulder when she first had to allow it to stop bleeding.
She might as well press on and finish her search.
Again she ventured down the corridor housing the detention cells. There were ten of them, five on each side of the hall, all of them on just the other side of the interrogation room and phony storage room.
The first six doors, those to cells I , II, III, VIII, IX and X, turned out to be as fake as the door to the storage room.
Cell IV, had been hers. It was, upon inspection, exactly as it had been when she had last been in it. Not wanting to revisit it, even for a moment, she quickly closed the door and moved on.
Cell V... "Shit..." she exclaimed as she stared at it and finally made the connection. The Roman numeral, five looked like a V... Could it be? Had he been prisoner V? Had such a horrible thing as that become his very identity?
Evey swung the door open and was not at all surprised to find a sleeping mat, pillow, orange jumpsuit and blankets on the floor. This then was where he had been sleeping. But why! Why had he felt compelled to relive his past as a prisoner once he had given his bed up to her?
"He is mad..." she breathed, still shocked by the very notion. She felt faint and both cold and sweaty to boot, but it wasn't due to shock from her wound; a quick check showed that the bandage still seemed to be doing its job. No. It was the mental anguish of discovering just how much V was still suffering from his past.
Her strength and resolve fading, Evey closed the door and hurried to end her search.
Across the hall was cell VI. It turned out to really be a small storage room. In it she found guard uniforms, orange prisoner jumpsuits and pullovers, metal food trays and cans of dog food along with a can opener.
She almost retched as she realized what the inedible food she had finally been forced to choke down had really been. One day she would pay him back for this, she silently vowed. Closing the door she moved on to the last cell.
Cell VII was a surprise indeed, for behind the door was an as yet, to her eye, unseen continuation of the shadow gallery. It was about half the size as the space he had already made use of, unheated and poorly lit. There were signs that he had begun to wire it with more lights and some heaters, so perhaps he was thinking of expanding his current space.
Inspecting the area carefully, Evey discovered two more doors. One seemed to be an alternate entrance from up above, for although the door was locked, there was light on the other side and a constant cold breeze, both of which were noticeable at the crack where the door met the floor.
The final door was likewise locked, but she had a clue where it might lead to...
Ripping a small piece from her already mangled T-shirt, she slid it under the door. Then she returned back through the detainment facility to the shadow gallery. Marching to the perpetually locked door a the back of the gallery, she stooped down and picked up that same piece of T-shirt.
A feeling of both triumph and disquiet settle upon her then. She now knew every part of the labyrinth her host shared with her. She knew where he slept, where he showered, even what kind of underwear he favored...
But she still knew little about him, about what drove him, what haunted him...
When he returned, things were going to change, she vowed. Even if she had to follow him everywhere,and push him to the edge, she would get something out of him. She would glimpse what lay beneath the mask, the symbol.
She would reveal the man who hid himself so carefully. Reveal not his face, but who he really was. Even if all he shared with her was a small bit of himself, it would be enough.
For now.
Exhausted and in some pain, Evey went in search of first aid supplies and perhaps some strong whiskey to top it off.
It was going to be a long, sleepless night and she had much courage to muster.
Next: Of Hope and Heartbreak
