Damages
Chapter Nine: Dermatology
V enveloped Evey in his cloak, guiding her back into the lift. She shivered wordlessly, a smile on her lips, droplets of water stuck to the fine hairs of her head. As the lift descended, she leaned against the rattling metal and closed her eyes.
"Evey…my apologies. I did not realize it was raining. You may become more ill."
Evey shrugged absently. "That doesn't matter."
V decided to remain stoically silent.
When the lift reached the level of the Gallery, V opened the doors and Evey stepped out, holding her arms to herself in an effort to remain warm.
V said quietly, opening the door to the Gallery with a rather ostentatious skeleton key, "I shall light a fire for you. Perhaps you should change your garments in favor of something more…hygienic."
Evey nodded, feeling a bit clouded over, but all the while very calm as she walked to her room. Something in the air, in the crackling lightning and the swirling clouds…something had changed her. Turmoil was everywhere; sadness, rain, these all existed…but yet things grew from them. Flowers blossomed, people were cleansed, and the world was refreshed.
She looked down at her wrists. They glared back in bloody anger, her bandages soaked once more.
"V?"
"I will bring gauze, yes," V's voice called from the living area.
She blinked, standing still and breathing slowly, in through her nose, out through her mouth. Was that the way to do it? She didn't remember. She peeled off her shirt and flung it to the floor, then removed her brassiere and began searching for a new, dry one, hardly caring that all of them were several sizes too large now.
She strapped it on, looking passively at the bruises, welts, and burns that covered her body. They were marks of her suffering, yes, but…she remembered seeing V's hands that day, when he had made her eggy in the basket. She imagined those burns traveled everywhere. How could she sob over a contusion, when she was still in her own skin?
Stepping in and out of various pieces of clothing, she felt the warmth of cotton and fleece envelop her, as V's cloak had done. Stepping softly into the living area, she sat beside V, who was staring into the crackling fire.
The light and flames played off of his mask, making the jovial smile suddenly sinister, contorting the rouge into spots of blood, forming the eyes into bottomless pits devoid of emotion. But when he tilted his head, and the soft silken hairs of his wig shimmered darkly in the firelight, the animosity was gone. It was as though when confronted with fire, he became demonic, changed, corrupted. Now, away from it, he was V, cool and calm and quite passive.
Evey noticed the pile of bandages and salves beside him. "I would like to bandage your wrists again, Evey."
She nodded, extending her left arm first. V turned, and they faced each other before the fire, half of their faces in shadow, the other half bathed in light. A bit of wood popped, and an ash coughed itself up from the smoldering embers. V reached back with a black-gloved hand, but Evey stopped him.
"V."
"Yes."
"Take off your…take off your gloves, please," she said softly and slowly.
V's mask turned to her, unreadable. "I beg your pardon, madam, but that simply would not d--"
"Please, V. Look at my skin." She thrust her arm into the glaring light of the fire. "It is scarred, and it is damaged."
V stood suddenly, but she gripped his hands with surprising strength and wrenched the gloves off. With a cry, not of anger but perhaps of shame, he clutched his hands to his chest.
"Evey, please…you do not know what you're doing…you can't possibly expect to see--"
"I've seen your hands already, V. And I'm not afraid of them. Do you know why?"
V remained silent.
Evey felt tears well up. "Because those hands, that are made of flesh and not of fabric, are the hands that cared for me. Not the hands beneath these gloves, the fingers that grasped and twisted and tortured me. I need you to heal me with the hands that did not harm me."
V swallowed. "I am still the same man, regardless of my flesh and bones."
Evey shook her head. "No. You are an idea, when you standing in your mask and gloves. But beneath all of this,"--she gestured to his attire--"beneath the Kevlar and the fabrics and the daggers…you are a person. With a heart. Who did this to save me, not to kill me, and not to break me. And now I need a person, not an idea, to heal me."
V said quietly, "You do not know what you are asking for. You have no idea what these hands feel like. Nor do I ever wish you to know." The anger in his voice was rising, but his tone was strained with despair. "Now, if you would not mind, please hand me my gloves, Miss Hammond, before you subject me to more shame under those eyes."
"Shame?!" Evey screamed, standing. "Are you fucking serious, V?" She stood and pushed him with her palms, pushing him back until his knees buckled against the couch. "Have you felt that feeling since you've been hiding under your mask?! What was done to you was terrible, V! I don't deny it! But I can't believe you would dare to look at me and tell me you're ashamed to be seen! After all of this! After everything you've done!"
V's breathing was ragged, and Evey stood over him like David over Goliath, tremendously surprised at the success of the attempt. He did not speak, but leveled his mask with her.
"Always silent!" Evey shouted. "Always so fucking philosophical! I'm so tired of it! Say something, damn it!"
"What would you wish for me to say?"
Evey flailed a hand in the air. "I don't know, V! Something prophetic, something inspirational…say something to me that isn't a riddle and isn't a question that's meant to test me!"
V tried to stand, but with a sudden ferocity she pushed him back down. "No. No. Stay here. Bandage my hands with your fucking gloves…it's all I'll get from you, anyway."
" 'Get from' me?" V's voice rose slightly in pitch.
Evey glared. "I've received empty apologies, attempts to feed me, and even though I am grateful for all that you have done in your hospitality, however abstract and unconventional it may be, you still keep yourself so distant I feel as though I am living alone here."
"You know nothing of living alone for as long as I have, Evey." V's voice sounded like a pained growl. "Yes, you have lived in the juvenile detention centers, and yes, you have committed acts that you are ashamed of so that you could live while you were young and alone. But there is a tremendous discrepancy between the two of us when one refers to solitude."
"Yeah." Evey could not think of anything to say. The slump of V's shoulders, they way they became less tense and poised and more afraid and cautious, made her step back, literally. He had followed her with his mask, never moving even as she evaded him subtly.
V said after a moment, "Now…I believe we should attend to matters that require attending to." With a slight cough, he murmured, "My gloves, please, Evey."
She handed the gloves to him and turned round, a war raging inside her in which one side longed to see the burns, to make him realize they were both scarred now, and one wished to respect his privacy. When she heard the last snap of leather, she turned.
Evey sat in front of the fire, extending her arms. V sat across from her, a bit farther than he had earlier, and gently lifted one arm to rest on his bent knee. With cleaning and soothing salves, he washed her cuts, which had improved slightly and were not as ragged and harsh in appearance. He gently wrapped more gauze around her wrists, encircling them in silken tenderness.
"Evey," he said slowly, his voice rising from his chest softly. "I know it may seem cold to you, and I know you have heard me reiterate this phrase so many times before that you have come to deny its truth, but I am terribly sorry for how far I allowed things to progress."
He swallowed audibly, and Evey could not tear her eyes away from his mask, even as he stared down at her hands and continued his ministrations.
"This world, the world in which we are living, so to speak, is one where if you do not face your fears, do not meet them with sword unsheathed, you will perish. Not because you have been injured, or sliced with the enemy's blade; no. You wither and perish because you are too paralyzed by fear and too oppressed to rise from your own ashes and simply face what exists. You must challenge appearances and the status quo because if they do not benefit, what good are they? You will die because you have never removed the blade from its sheath."
Evey blinked.
"The reason I wished for you to remain in the cell for a longer time was so that when Valerie's note arrived to you, you were able to hear the testimony of one who reclaimed her identity and faced her darkest fears; the betrayal of a loved one, illness, death…these things are unavoidable in reality, and death was inevitable in a prison such as the one in which we were detained. Valerie overcame her fear and found the part of her soul worth holding on to. You simply did not have that chance, because you decided to end your own life."
Evey felt hot tears course down her face. She didn't realize she was crying.
"Suffering is not perpetual, Evey, nor is fear. A shadow passing along your window at night is nothing more than the tangled branches of the elm tree, and in the morning you will see birds nesting. The sounds you hear are not those of demons but those of a piece of architecture. You must see the reality, see what is inside, see what exists even when the lights are out, to overcome your fear."
V's breath hitched for a moment. Evey tilted her head, and felt his grip on her wrist grow tighter.
"Evey, when I saw you there, lying in your own blood…it was what I had most feared. I so desperately wanted that awful charade to end, but you were not progressing as I hoped you would, and I felt as though I was making you some damnable experiment, when you are a living, breathing person. When I realized what you had done, I regretted my decision, not to imprison you, but my decision to leave you alone for so long. You needed Valerie, as I needed her, as she needed herself. It was not a weakness in you, but a weakness in me. I may seem like a wall of mortar, Evey, but even the mightiest walls have fissures."
Evey tried to swipe at her tears, but V held her hand. "Why do you fear even your own tears, Evey? You have cried for so long, do not let this moment pass without marking it as you will. You have changed, Evey. You are not the woman you once were. The hardest task for you, now, is to reclaim the life you led, to emerge into the world afresh, and unafraid."
Evey nodded, breathing slowly. With a gentle brush of his thumb, V wiped a tear away, letting it gather on the fine threading of his glove. "These, too, can feel like hands," he said softly.
"V," Evey said slowly. "I understand that the image you have of yourself is one of a terrorist, and not a person deserving of what every other human being needs…you have made that quite clear to me. You see yourself as an idea, as an embodiment of something not entirely human. Something that transcends physiology and becomes…metaphysical, almost."
V's mask continued to reflect the firelight pensively.
"But V, I…I see you as a person. I see you as a man, and…and…you made me feel human again…and I want you to…" Evey stammered clumsily, choking over her words, which felt dry and uncomfortable in her mouth, yet they settled in her brain solidly. "I want to just feel your hands, V, and make you feel like a human, too."
V inhaled slowly and deeply.
"Please, V. I won't beg this time. If you don't want me to, that's fine. I just want to hold your hands for a moment. That's all."
Evey's voice was dripping like honey into V's ears, and he felt himself slowly melting as well, the honesty in her deep brown eyes compelling him. He had broken her, and still, she longed to heal him.
Slowly, deliberately, he pulled off his right glove, exposing his reddened, raised skin to the light, letting her eyes travel over the crevices and tangles of scar tissue.
Evey's hand did not tremble as she reached for his, brushing her fingertips lightly across the back of his hand. Fingernails were not discernable, but the length and elegance of his fingers did not escape her notice. V could barely feel the whisper of her touch, but knowing that she was sitting there, before him, actually physically making contact with his skin, was enough to make him ill with anxiety and swooning with happiness.
He pulled off his other glove, letting her hold both hands, examining, thinking, biting her lip in that inquisitive way she had.
Lifting his hand to her lips, she kissed it, kissed every finger and his palm softly and with such warmth that the fire beside them offered no contest. V's breath caught, and he found himself unable to look away, unable to fully comprehend what was happening.
She repeated her ministrations with his left hand, and gently set it on the floor beside the other, relaxing him.
"Evey, I…I have not been touched in so long…I confess that I am not quite sure how to--"
Evey shook her head. "You never had the time to heal, V. You never had anyone to care for you, the way you've cared for me." She reached out with a slender arm and cupped his mask in her hand. "Thank you for what you've done. For who you've made me."
She looked down at her wrists.
"I will bear these scars forever," she said softly. "But I will not see them as brands or markings of shame, or deceit, or pain. I will see them as reminders of who we can all become, who we all need to be, to survive."
V reached for his gloves and slid them on, as quickly as he could. "I am sorry, Evey. I do not believe I am ready for this." He stood, running one gloved hand through his silken wig.
Evey whispered, "You're so strong, V…you can do this."
V murmured, "Evidently I am not as strong as you."
Thank you to all of my readers who have been so loyal and patient. I am sorry that I have taken so long to update.