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Ca va sans Dire	By : FreeSpiritedOne Category: S through Z > V for Vendetta Views: 4138 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own V for Vendetta. I do not own V, Evey, Finch or any other character. I make no profit from this story.

Chapter List
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Alright, a brief note
to inform you we will be going over some of the technical/gory details of
burns.� If you don�t want to know, skip
this chapter.

It also seems
necessary to point out that in no way is V typical of burn survivors in the
graphic novel, the film, or here.� Burns
are no joke and their aftermath goes far beyond issues of appearance.�

Chapter 6

Evey Hammond
was a very busy girl. �After her first
meeting with Finch, things happened fast. �First Detective Stone came on board and both
men sent out feelers to others they thought might share their views. �Within a few days a small group had formed and
by the end of the week they numbered twenty with more joining every day.

�All were people with
talents needed in the current fight and all appeared as committed as she
was.� Evey was journeying topside every
day and spending more and more time on the roof where her mobile had good
reception.

In spite of her efforts, the group was splitting into
factions.� Less than half wanted a
nonviolent solution.� The others
advocated whatever was necessary to destroy their enemies.� It did not help to know V himself was firmly
lodged in the second camp, even if he would not speak about it.

As the mouth piece of the group and the leader of
nonviolence faction the more days that passed without action the harder her job
became.�

Evey wanted the remaining Norsefire brass to be tried in a
court of law, convicted by juries of their peers and imprisoned for the rest of
their natural lives. �She would use those
enemies as examples, just as Norsefire had done.� The only difference was she would use them to
prove to the people justice would apply to all, not just the masses of faceless
�undesirables�.� She would show them this
by treating even the worst among them fairly.�
Where Norsefire had been secrets, lies and violence, the new democratic
government would be free, transparent and fair.�

Norsefire�s grasp on the reins of power might have been weakening, their ability to control the media slipping each
day, but their security remained impeccable.�
She had not yet been able to formulate a decent plan to capture the
three men she needed to bring the entire house of cards down.�

Those advocating a quicker solution were gaining strength. �If she could not deliver a change in regime
soon, her dreams of equal protection under the law would die and the new
government would be no better than the one it replaced.
�
It was a huge responsibility and one Evey would have gladly
handed over to someone else if she felt she could.

If that had been all that consumed her thoughts it would
have been overwhelming enough, but she was also tending an injured man who came
complete with more issues than any politician running for office could hope to
juggle.

V was not a good patient. �He was strong willed, opinionated, more
knowledgeable and impossible to argue with. �He was healing at a faster rate than the
medical books said was normal, though he was still spending most of his time in
bed. �

He would not let her see his wounds or change the dressings.
�He was no longer letting her be in
charge of the IV fluids. �He would not let
her help him stand or walk.� His only real
concession had been leaving her in charge of meals which he politely refused to
eat with her.

She would bring him a plate and he would plead a lack of
hunger, absorption in the book he was reading, being too tired at the moment,
or feeling a little nauseous to avoid eating in her presence. ��Before
when he had been healthy, he�d always insisted he ate as he cooked and by the
time he was done he was too full to eat more.

Genius was not needed to figure out, in spite of his
admission of love, V would do almost anything to keep
her from peaking behind the mask.�

During the stretch of time between her imprisonment and her
return Evey had been obsessed with V.�
She watched the news constantly hoping for some notice about him. �The reports were always false, but just
hearing his name made her feel better. �

She had spent a lot of time wondering about him.� She knew almost nothing about him, but what
little she information she had, she researched.�
Mostly that was torture and burns.�

Evey was by that time intimately familiar with torture even
though she knew what had happened to her only scratched the surface of the horrors
men inflected on each other.� Try though
she might, she couldn�t bring herself to think of things worse than what she
herself had endured.�

Instead she researched burns on the interlink
and the library.�

She found out there were three degrees of burns and that
each had unique challenges for the patient. �Almost everyone suffered a first degree burn
at some point in their life. �A sunburn could do it. �Second degree burns were the kind that caused
the skin to blister. �You could get them
from a sunburn too and Evey had once when she was six.
�Those hurt. �A lot, but they healed with little or no
scarring. �Third degree burns were also
called full thickness burns meaning they went all the way through the skin to subdural tissues. �

The only way to repair them was to graft skin from unburned
parts of the body onto the burned parts, but this could only be done once all
the burned and dead tissue was removed through a heinous process called debridement. �The
grafts themselves didn�t always work, were not pretty and did not have the same
flexibility as normal skin because they were only the upper layers of skin, the
mature cells. �They didn�t grow like
regular skin, they scarred.

Third degree burns usually resulted in a loss of sensations
since the nerve endings also burned away. �Debridement was
awful because tissues below the burned skin and subcutaneous fat still had
nerves. �And, to add to the agony, third
degree burns were surrounded by hyper painful second degree burns.

She had seen V�s hands only once.� Those were 3^rd degree burns and he
was very lucky to still have his fingers.�
Most people whose hands burned lost several digits in the process.� More than that, he was lucky to still have
the dexterity he had.� Scar tissue is
thick and inelastic rendering limbs encased in it inflexible and weak.� V was anything but weak or inflexible.� He was also very sensitive to touch.

It was natural to wonder how much more of him was burned in
the fire. He had never said.� Judging
from the mask, his face had been injured.�
This concerned her.� She had to
know if she could live with it.

It was shallow, she knew, the inside is the important
thing.� The shell changes on
everyone.� There would come a day when she
was no longer beautiful too, but the truth remained; appearances matter. She
wanted to be a girl who could look past the damage. �

The medical books had lots of pictures and she studied them,
looking for the beauty that had to be there.�
At first all she could do was pity the poor souls whose faces had melted
like wax candles. Many had lost ears, noses, lips, even eye lids.� One girl�s scars had contracted so badly her
chin was stuck to her chest.� It was hard
to look at and Evey felt overwhelmed with pity.��

But as Evey continued, she started to see other things.� She trained her eye to see past what was
missing or deformed and find what was beautiful and precious.� It started with the eyes.� There was something different in the
eyes.�

These were people who had seen things most would be lucky
enough not to and that reflected in their eyes.�
The strength and determination, the defiance staring back at her from the
photographs was striking and made all the more so because so often those
emotions shown from heavily damaged faces.�

Eventually Evey could even see the difference between the
people who were recently burned and those that had adjusted to their new skin.� The first group was angry, they were still
thinking it could get better and were thus embarrassed.� The later group though, they were tired of
being stared at, sick of being pitied and ready to just get on with it if
everyone else would just leave them alone long enough to do it.

Even though twenty years had passed V was caught in limbo
between the two groups.� Evey blamed his
isolation for that.� She also decided
that even if his face was completely destroyed, even if his entire body was
covered in scars, it didn�t matter.� The
man behind the fa�ade of Guy Fawkes, beneath the mask
of scars, under the camouflage of chivalry, he was beautiful and she loved him.

Evey had known she did long before November 4^th
when she was finally ready to admit it to him.�
She just tried to fight it off which was a lot like running as fast as
she could to avoid getting wet in a rain storm.

The trouble was she had convinced herself V did not
reciprocate those feelings.� She hadn�t been
able to work up the courage to share her own.�
After all, could a man in love torture the object of his
affections?� Other than that terrible month,
he had been the model for renaissance era chivalry, Miss Manners� star pupil
and thus aloof and untouchable.� There
was always a distance between them.�

Nothing he had done indicated to her he felt anything beyond
a friendly student/teacher type of level.�
Then on the train tracks, bleeding to death, V told her he was in love
with her. ��There�s no tree waiting for me.�
She should have told him she was his sturdy oak. �Instead she had muttered something about going
away together.� Of course, he refused. �

When he returned, her heart broke. �He was dying before her eyes and she had not
told him she loved him. �He did.� He got the words out and the best she could
do was disagree with him. �Her last words
to him had been, that�s
not true. �

For two horrible hours he was dead and she thought of all
the things she wished she�d said to him, the things she wished she�d showed
him.� She bargained with God, promising
if he gave V back to her she would make him know love.� She would show him what it was and prove to
him he could have it, he already had
it.� She would do it the same way he
taught her fear was useless.� Then they
would be even.

Now that she had the chance, she was not going to waste it.

~~~~~

Author�s notes:

To me, it seems the
only way to deal with the unknown is to get to know it and the only way to
accept is to understand which is why Evey went on her research quest.�

Review responses:

Ero, thanks for the support of my decision to
have V quote from a wider range of literature than just Shakespeare (who�s brilliance is unsurpassed, but who�s words don�t
always say what V wants them to�.at least as filtered through me).

LittleMissReaper, I promise to keep updating.
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