WARNING: This chapter is quite visual and generally freaky, I recommend any young readers to distain from reading this chapter (at least the half) the story will make enough sense without it anyway.
V sat in his normal chair, a book in his hands, a smile painted across his face, staring up into the painted eyes of Monique. She stared back at him with her patient gaze. Her eyes had followed him from the kitchen to his spot in the chair. She was naked, her arms criss-crossed around her hips, her expression was not that of embarrassment but of shock or even fear. Since the moment he sat down he hadn't left her eyes to examine the book in his hands. Not once.
The artist had captured her eyes so perfectly: glazed, wet, pleading. When he had first brought the painting to his home, he had seen a small amount of himself in those eyes. His weakness and futility when stripped of his clothes. But Monique had humanity, in her tears was compassion. In himself he saw no humanity, not now. In her he could no longer find his soul, nor could he find any real reason why he ever had, not after her.
She had been right about him, he was a monster, he had done nothing to warrant her love. She must have been completely out of her mind to have even considered loving him, she had been weak and confused, scrambled in her mindset. He could only hope she had. If she indeed did love him he could only imagine what sort of mental state she had gone through in his care. It was not entirely unlikely he had driven her completely mad.
He could see her now. Her body, skeletally slimming, lying half dead on the concrete floor of her cell. Suddenly awoken my the harsh feel of his boot in her ribs. She would twitch in agony or slither into the corner in the way a wounded animal would, her skin cold and raw from hours of senseless torture. Her eyes pleading just in the way the Monique's did. Wet and cold, contempt lurking on her lips. He had sat in his room with that same look plastered across his continence, looking at himself in the mirror with a razor in one hand.
She had screamed as he crushed her pelvis to the floor with his foot, and he extracted the same scream out of himself. He had never hated anything as much as he had hated himself then, more than Lewis Prothero serving him his tri-daily beatings, more than father Lilliman preaching to his trembling body about the horrors of homosexuality, more than Rossiter pinning his weak limbs up against the wall and beating and raping him until he passed out from exhaustion or sometimes went into shock.
In Rossiter's hands he had found more hate than anything he had ever come across before or since; manhandling his legs and arms, testicles and face, his thumb pressing into his jaw muscles in such a way to stop the screaming as the other arm knocked the wind out of his rapidly thinning gut.
He had cut off those hands, the night the prison had gone up in flames, tracking the guard down in the woods as he ran from the flaming building, taking both his wrists in his still smouldering, skinless, oozing hand and slicing them at the base. He had never felt such glory as in those few minutes, knowing he could do anything. But he looked down at his hands in his room at night and saw them again, reattached to his wrists, staring back at him. He had cried for the fist time in his life that fist night. Wishing that he could pull them apart at the bones.
He couldn't look at her any longer, as much as he wanted to prove to himself that he could if he wanted to. Silently, tears rolled down his scarred cheeks and into the collar of his tunic. He sat down in front of the television while his hands searched subconsciously for the remote. The television automatically flicked onto the BTN news where he had left it earlier that day. And his ears were filled with the sound of her name. No. NO!
Evey rolled over onto her side and was overcome with the urge to scream. She did. The nurse entered. He was young and inexperienced, his name was Stephen. He fumbled with Evey's chart and, not sure exactly what to do, he turned up her morphine drip ½ a point. Her body relaxed slightly and he instantly wondered weather he had used too much. Could he call for someone? No, everyone on call was either attending to the patients from the fire on Bayswater road that those X finger-men had started or trying to ward off any press eager to see the Hammond girl.
He looked down at her bruised face, half hidden by the oxygen mask. He took a step closer, she was so young, even younger then himself, it was amazing how much other people could accomplish such a young age and he couldn't. Steve took a moment to glance back on his life with a pinch of disappointment. One of his hands landed softly on her forehead to take her temperature.
She was so soft. The young nurse wished deeply that someday he might meet a decent woman like her and run off on some adventure. His train of though was suddenly cut short as a small breeze of wind caught the hairs on the back of his neck. He stood up and found his way to the window in the half light. Finding the clip with his index finger and sliding it closed. He took one more look at the beautiful woman, illuminated only by the dull florescent light bulb and the even duller afternoon sunlight. Then he left.
Her the shape of her body was formed as an image in shadows and orange patters as the sunset projected into the window. There was a sound, deep and profound, dark and full of both sadness and admiration. As she stirred, she heard it say: "The mute eloquence of her look and manner was only the harbinger of that same thrilling eloquence which fell from her tongue when I won the declaration of her affection."* the voice was familiar and yet so new and refreshed that she was just close enough to realizing who it belonged to that she became frustrated with not being able to understand just who it was at all. Her breath heaved in concentration, but she did not have the energy to fathom such things at this time. She gave up and quickly dozed off again. He hesitantly slid one finger down her cheek and then casually surveyed her chart. She would be well sooner then he had thought, she was a lucky woman his Evey…no. Not his. Never his. He would come back for her then, when she was well again. He wouldn't be able to stop himself.
He climbed down the fire escape and out onto the now deserted street and muttered under his breath: "There were moments, too, when I would have gladly paid the price for all my future life to redeem and cancel my past; for I was already shrunk, with prophetic fears, from what was to come. Nor could the intoxicated anticipations of what ample wealth which awaited me, when another year should elapse…" The cape of the masked man twirled in the darkness orange and melted into the shadow of an alley as he spoke. "…make me forget that I was doomed to enjoy it alone."**
* & ** both from "The Casket" by George R. Graham