Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue.
A/N: Another Evey-Post The Fifth story, mostly train of thought/sequence of events. I believe some would call that a story. Yes, I'm rambling. I'll shut up now. Read, review, let me know what you think.
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"Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor."
-The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe
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Sometimes, odd times, when the world is quiet and heavy within the stone shadows of the gallery, she'll come to a complete stand still. There is a flash of something ice cold and terrible, an iron hand that wraps around her throat until she can't breathe. "What if—?" ripples though her mind and drags down her spine.
"God, I killed him."
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Evey regrets not telling him that she didn't hate him.
She didn't love him, not the way he wanted to be loved, but she didn't hate him and she thinks she should have told him before he staggered into the darkness.
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The only thing that stops the panic that settles into the pit of her stomach, the iron band around her chest, is the memory of his blood, red and slick and warm, cooling, sticky and stiff, against her hands. She remembers his blood—God, so much blood—and the stillness in his body, the weight of it against her.
And she thinks that he must have been dead because she couldn't remember him ever being so still when alive.
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She doesn't know what door leads back to the fake prison and she doesn't bother going off into the secret rooms of the gallery, afraid of what she might find. She stays with the books and watches Edmond Dantès and plants new roses for Valerie since all the old ones went with him and she decides to ignore the revolution that thunders over her head.
For now anyways.
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The food is running low and the roses don't bloom for her hands like they did for his and everything is falling apart, the gallery still too much his home—how had she ever expected it to be hers?—and she doesn't know what to do.
V is gone and the new world is as cruel as the last and for all her years of fear, she never felt quiet so alone.
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It is not the dark that Evey is afraid of anymore, or the quiet. She is not afraid of solitude or the looming uncertainty of the times. There is little that frightens Evey now, and most of it comes from within the shadows inside her head
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She's not afraid of what will happen to her. It's not fear that keeps her, its something else entirely. It's the desire to keep his things in order, to grow Valerie her roses and read every black-listed book her parents ever loved and he ever quoted until the words run as easily from her mouth as they did from Guy Fawkes' painted grin.
So she stays even when all the food is gone and pulls up the weeds and wilted stems that never bloomed.
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Sometimes, odd times, when the world is dark and heavy, like the material of his cloak draped across her huddled shoulders, her mind will open to a not-so-ridiculous idea. It edges towards her slowly, pressing itself against the odd objects in the room, like a cat, pausing in step before beginning languidly towards her, the notion that maybe…
Maybe the world will work itself out. Maybe, one day, she'll grow not only Valerie roses, but V roses too. Maybe she'll take every book with her, spread them to the people who have accepted his fire and sing his revolution. She thinks that maybe, soon, she'll be ready to walk away, away from this shadow and this necessity and this place she has forced for herself.
She thinks that perhaps he died and heard her pleas from him to stay—stay with her—and heard the absence of hate, possibility of reciprocation.
Her fingers are rough and scabbed, like the shiny patches of skin that litter her skin—the reminders and souvenirs of her liberation—and they catch in the folds of fabric, pulling it tight against the angles of her body.
And she thinks of possibility.
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End
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