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Resurrection Blues	By : JackHawksmoor Category: DC Verse Comics > V for Vendetta Views: 2254 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own V for Vendetta, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Resurrection Blues
- 2-ch 2
- 3-ch3
- 4-ch4
- 5-ch 5
- 6-CH 6
- 1
- 2
Resurrection Blues

Ch 1

Author's note: The first paragraph describes a scene taken right from the movie.

(Creedy was dead. For a moment, just a moment, the urge to crumple at his feet, to just lay down and die was so strong he couldn't move. He couldn't think. Every scrap of energy he had was focused on keeping his feet. The chest plate was so heavy. Peeling it off was like removing a layer of skin. The light was crawling over the walls, as if something terrible and wonderful was trying to break free of its chains. He tried to ignore it, his fingers fumbling with straps. Around him, the walls flexed and swelled, breathing like some giant, monstrous creature...)

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Evey Hammond had blood under her fingernails. She had dirt on her face and a furious joy buzzing in her ears.

Breathless and smothering a smile, she pulled the door open and poked her head out into the street.

A couple, laughing, walking away from her. About a block away. The girl was wearing a cape, the boy had his draped over one arm.

Across the street, there was a bald man smoking. Smoking, on the street!

In plain view of everyone, the man blew gray smoke into the air. Then he looked her right in the eye and grinned as if challenging her to say something. She couldn't imagine where he'd even gotten the cigarettes, they must have cost a fortune. There hadn't been even poor tobacco available, not for years and years...

She pulled her head back inside.

“You'll have to wear it,” she said, trying not to laugh. “There's people about.”

Finch sighed, looking very tired, but did as she bid him. A moment later he was just another reveler venturing out after curfew in a Guy Fawkes mask.

“I don't know when it will be safe to meet again,” He said, voice muffled. It didn't upset her. It was still Finch's voice, Finch's slumping shoulders under the cape.

“I'm sure I'll manage,” she said sweetly, firmly.

She ushered Finch to the door like a lover, handed him onto the street. Handed him over to London, much like V had done with her, that first night. As she locked the door she was lifted with a warm surge of memory. Returned home safe...The tenderness that welled up caught her off guard, left her suddenly struck dumb and fighting tears.

She turned from the door and went down, down and in, through lifts and tunnels until she found herself standing in front of the Wurlitzer without any thought of getting there. She stared at it blindly for a few moments before the shape of it registered. Evey looked around with a start to find herself in the exact spot she'd been in five days ago, when she'd returned to him.

For a sick, shivery moment she was sure she'd gone back somehow, and that any moment he would walk slowly out of her old room to greet her.

“I...didn't think you'd come...”

She hissed in a breath and spun around, her heart high in her throat.

Please, oh-

Nothing. Empty.

She leaned slowly back against the frame of the machine, as if an impossibly huge hand was pushing her back.

Alone in the empty ruins of V's possessions she let out a small sound of despair. It resembled nothing more than a small child's smothered cry. She pressed her hands to her face as if to hold in any other treacherous noises. Suddenly weary at the lonely sound of her own echo, she took a hand from her mouth and leaned back more heavily against the jukebox. It propped her up without complaint, a second spine at her back.

Her thumb hit a button, and the machine started to hum and click while she silently lamented the absence of a friend. After a few moments something sweet and sad filled the gallery. V had seemed to be fond of that one...

Evey saw it clearly in her mind's eye, how V had often lingered over the selection.

“Ah,” he said, pleased, “ here we are.” She heard the warmth in his voice as if he was leaning over her shoulder, and she jumped, craning her neck to look around her.

No. No, it was just madness...

The lights were flickering. The music echoed softly as she cried... and the lights were flickering.

She looked up, shivering at the sudden chill in the air. In all the time she'd been there, she had never seen anything in poor repair, nothing that V possessed in anything but perfect working order. Oblivious to her surprise, the light over her head failed completely.

With a sharp wrench of anguish she wondered if the gallery knew he was gone.

Then she looked down, and he was standing there. Evey jumped like someone had jabbed her fingers into a socket.

She choked, reeling back, stumbling against the Wurlitzer. She caught herself by her fingernails, almost crashing onto the floor.

He was coming towards her, roaring at her with a rumble and a sudden fierce wind that whipped her in the face and had her thinking wildly that he hadn't gotten himself off the train at all, no, he'd brought it with him, growling at his heels like a rabid dog.

He flickered like a candle, darkness whipping around him and then dancing away again. Black curtains gone mad in a high wind. The air felt like cement in her mouth and she realized she couldn't breathe.

“V,” she gasped with a huge intake of air and half-doubled over, booted in the stomach at the sight of him.

From the moment she set eyes on him she knew it was V. The certainty clenched around her spine, breaking bone. The whole world waited as he approached her. She knew exactly where he would step, knew how his body would move as well as if it was she who'd done the walking. It was heart-poundingly familiar. The air thickened, rippling and straining at the light. The edges of everything sharpened until it hurt to look. She almost wanted to scratch at her eyes. Someone had taken a magnifying glass to the whole room. The air was heavy, smothering her. It was worse, and better, than it had ever been.

She twitched as he drew close, her mind unraveling one strand at a time.

He was like a picture of V that was better than the real thing. Clear. Solid. Real. Too real...the shadows on his mask could have cut glass or driven a man insane.

He reached out with one hand and she found herself tensing in anticipation. Over the past five days she'd had some thought, some vague sense of being at the end of a great story. A sort of relief, mixed in with the grief and wonder. She had finished her part in The Story Of V And Evey. She'd remembered the way it felt being close to him, like her steps had been laid out in front of her. The quiet hand of fate at her back.

Evey had felt the lack of that, and thought her part had been played...She'd thought herself at the ending when she was actually barreling blindly toward the climax. As she leaned toward his outstretched hand she couldn't help but think there would be a reckoning for her mistake.

Then he touched her, and it was like slipping into a pond. Cool and clear and wonderful. The contact felt supernatural. The wind died and the light softened. It was so startling, so obviously...other... that when she heard a chime and looked up, she was barely capable of any more surprises.

She tilted her head, a reflex, searching for the source of the sound. What had started as a faint ringing rapidly swelled in clarity and volume until it sounded like a ghostly orchestra had risen around them. She turned to stare at him, mouth slightly open.

The glass. Every piece of glass in the gallery was ringing. There was a faint thrumming coming from the piano. The glass covering his cases of butterflies were rattling in the frames.

His cold white mask regarded her silently, confounding reality.

She made an animal noise and flung herself at him, sobbing breathlessly into black cloth that smelled like smoke and blood.

Faintly, she heard the sound of breaking glass.

V hissed in a breath as if suffering from a few too many holes in his lungs to inhale properly. Rasping. The air came out as her name.

“Evey.” Harsh and winded and barely sounding like himself. He turned his head towards her as she buried her face in his neck.

She was too far gone to notice anything for a while. A difficult thing, when wishes come true.

Breath and tears and the crush of black fabric under her fingers. Hot gouts of pain heaving up out of her, soaking into his shirt.

His hands were at her waist. He was holding her gently, as if she would break. She would, or he would.

“You said no lies.” She spoke into his shoulder, her voice barely audible. “You were dying. You were dead.”

She pulled back from him a little, going cold.

“You were dead,” she whispered with certainty. She'd made sure of it. She'd made absolutely sure-

She did not think of the blood on her arms, of the heavy limp way his head lolled as she dragged his corpse toward the doors of the train.

Instead she rested her hand flat on his chest. She could feel the muscle underneath. Muscle, and nothing else.

“Your heart's not beating,” she said faintly. She blinked and a tear dislodged from her eyelashes and fell free of her face onto her outstretched hand.

Above them, the lights flickered.

His hand lifted up, hesitating like old machinery. His glove pressed against her cheek. It smelled like fire and brimstone. She did not flinch.

“Yes,” he said in a rusty voice. “Yes, I remember dying. You were-” He turned his head in a surprisingly swift movement, a quick glance as if trying to place where he was now as opposed to where he had died.”You were there,” he continued. His voice was abruptly much more like it had been, smoother, stronger.

“What's happened to you?” she asked with a certain measure of detached horror clouding her voice. He stepped back from her, looked down at himself briefly. It almost...it almost hurt a little, when he pulled away from her. She was suddenly very tired.

“'Diseased Nature oftentimes breaks forth in strange eruptions...'” He sounded shaky.

He was standing right in front of her, but she suddenly missed him so badly she had to gasp past the pain in her chest.

He took an unsteady step back, looking as bad as she felt. He did not reach for her, but lifted a hand to lean against the back of a chair that was close. He slipped, upending it in a clumsiness so uncharacteristic it gave her a chill.

It was him. It was his voice. It was him, it had to be or she really was mad.

She managed to catch him but fumbled it again, and they both went down.

The motion, the feel of him folding in her arms shoved ice down the back of her neck. She was reminded of ghosts replaying the final moments of their lives, over and over, whether anyone cared to watch or not.

Evey tasted hell in that moment, and shuddered in real anguish as she looked down into the upturned face of his mask.

“Ohhh, Evey,” he sighed. “I don't think I can stay long...”

There were no bullet wounds, no bullet holes, and no heartbeat...

“You can breathe, can't you?” she demanded, fighting through her tears. “If you're speaking, you're breathing.”

She took his hand in hers, pushed it up against her own chest, where her own heart was beating, stuttering along in shock.

“If you can breathe, you can live!” she snarled at him, not caring if it made no sense. Couldn't do without a heart, hearts were too important to go without...

She pushed his hand against her heart as if she could push one into the other-as if he could live by osmosis.

A corpse couldn't breathe but he could. He could do it. He could live if he wanted it...

The lights were flickering madly now, a staccato beat of bright and dark that had the shadows crawling in unnatural shapes all around them.

Her heart was pounding unpleasantly under his fingers, it almost felt like he was holding it. She was so cold, and if it was all in her head the air shouldn't fog with her breath like that, should it?

Somewhere within the failing lights all the color had been leached out of the gallery. Camera flashes in black and white.

Evey reached down, touched his chest with numb fingers.

Way back in a dusty unused corner of her mind, she felt like something was asking her a question.

“Stay,” she said softly. It felt like it was the most important thing she'd ever said, as if it meant more than she could possibly imagine.

The pain was sharp and unexpected. A burst of agony like she'd been shot in the chest. She fell back onto the ground with a cry.

Shuddering, moaning as if he felt it too, V reached for her, trying to keep her close.

In her last moment of clarity she was certain she was dying.

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“Diseased Nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions.” -King Henry IV
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Resurrection Blues