A/N: It seems the lurkers have claws. This re-post is for you ex-lurkers who PMed and prodded and guilt-tripped me after A Christmas Carol's untimely demise. You baffle me. Still, this was meant to be posted all in one shot like this anyway, instead of the day-by-day sentimentality I got attacked with. So here you go. Last six days unedited.

12. Drummers Drumming

Love at first sight is too cliché even for him, and so he doesn't – it is, perhaps, the only thing V can be grateful for. No, it is only on the roof, with the night sky screaming his name in vicious explosions of savage colour, and then this girl-woman stranger turns to him and V – he falls, never knowing.

Just a split-second, this true beginning of his end: just her swift measured glance, just his breath catching in his throat. And it is this simple, this terrible: he saw what she could be, and it was enough.

It would've been easier if he'd simply thought of her as beautiful.

11. Pipers Piping

Second time: a week after her capture, when she still tiptoes around the Gallery as if being quiet would make him forget that another human is living in his home of twenty years. It is very tiring, watching her miserable indecision – it is very distracting, and V is just considering the alternative of a swift dispatch when it happens again, like a blow to the senses: a flash of her dark eyes, of her wry observance and razor-light humor. Then he blinks, and Evey is gone – the woman before him is doe-eyed and subdued again, as if fear can swallow entire personalities.

V is already caught, anyway.

10. Lords a Leaping

Outside the window of her new keeper's abode, with elegant death in his hands and dark fury coursing through his veins. Betrayer, double-dealer, Sutler's puppet, whore! Twenty years and the future of a million lives, and for a hypocrite devil of a dead god, she'd nearly…

Evey sleeps the same way she does in his Gallery – curled and defensive, somehow. Innocent and treacherous as Eve of original sin. He should end her now, he knows savagely, before she tempts destruction of everything he has worked for. Anger makes his chest ache. And yet, the night air must have been colder than V thought, because his hands are numb when they draw his scythes from their sheaths. Numb enough, it seems, that when he tries to gauge the throw, the ribbed hilt slipped loosely in his gloved fingers and he fumbles for the first time in a decade. The dagger falls to the dark bushes below, harmless. V stares.

It is a terrible time to realize he could be in love.

9. Ladies Dancing

In hell, Evey is both fragile and breathtakingly unbreakable. Through the thin leather, with his hand bruising her throat, V can feel brittle sparrow-bones of her collar under his palm, can feel the flutter-beat of her pulse. He counts each one methodically. At three hundred, he drowns Evey's gasps with a last shove under the water, slams her forehead against the trench's bottom easily, and goes outside to break down.

If Evey – the real Evey – survives this, he will never get to keep her.

If Sutler's Evey – the whorish traitor – survives this, he will stop falling so desperately in love.

In the end, it is, V thinks numbly, only an illusion of choice.

8. Maids a Milking

On the roof, in the rain, when they are both crying except he has no right to, and so he stops the words from spilling out so she would never know. Two weeks later, Evey calls him a monster and V has never loved her more.

7. Swans a Swimming

So many times in the period before she left that those two weeks blurs into one unspoken declaration for V. When her eyes turns agate-hard whenever they fall on him; when she cried when she saw the books in her room again and touched them reverently like the old friends they were; when he sits outside her room every night and listens to her breathing fill the whole silence of the Galley… I love you, I love you, I love you – in time with her exhale, in time with his dying heart. He wishes she would leave.

6. Geese a Laying

And then she does leave, and he is still so badly in love. He can't stop it, this sickness; it is worse than any other madness he has ever had. There are mirror-slivers in his hands, and he does not know how they got there.

The trick is the move on, V knows. To learn to live again: to breathe, walk, eat, sleep, think, kill – in that order. It takes nearly a month, but he does it. He had done it before, after all. Only sometimes does he wake up with his throat still raw.

5. Golden Rings

Somewhere in the third month after Evey leaves, V writes a letter. He tells Evey everything, everything – writing blindly and grasping only at instinct. He drowns himself in words desperately, from Larkhill to the killings to the Fifth; to finally, fatally, the moment he'd seen her. He gives everything but an apology. It is a confession of sins. It is a love letter.

He writes it carefully, agonizingly. In an inkless pen in Latin, on paper already filled with the mechanic instructions of constructing a homemade bomb. Then V burns it and seals the ashes in a cylinder. It nestles snugly between the crates of gelignite on his train.

All of my crimes, he thinks dully, I will carry with me to my grave.

4. Calling Birds

Evey has grown shockingly beautiful the next time he glimpses her. It is obscene. He has never seen her as anything but Evey.

It may have been the trick of the light when her diamond-dark eyes flash to the roofs, where he is hidden by the engulfing silhouette of a chimney; they linger for a heartbeat too long before Evey drops her eyes again and resumes her walk. It is impossible, of course, that she saw him. He has done this for fifteen years. She had looked straight at him.

When Evey turns the corner, V does not follow. His hands do not shake when dispatching his next two targets for the night. He thinks later, while wiping his blades clean, that he is finally learning.

3. French Hens

The masks are released with loving pandemonium. The dark euphoria sings in his veins and sleep visits less often than ever when V can't stop calculating, planning, reliving each possibility with the blind instinct of breathing. He has taken to domino-building to steady his wild blood-thirst for the finale – finally, finally – and it helps better than expected. Clearly:

Hammond must come back – to herald a new era.

Hammond must come back – because this revolution is no longer his, and who else is better suited to choose?

The domino fits perfectly in V's palm. It is pretty, but in the end, it is only a tool.

2. Turtle Doves

And then…

…and then by the jukebox, she turns and she is a stranger again, this girl-woman. Just a split-second of her old haunted eyes, just a breath caught in his throat, and my god, it is not fair but it is over for him again – V falls, still fighting.

There are no layers of lies and fears to protect him this time: there is only Evey, only her shorn head and her calm, unforgiving stare and V has missed her beyond words. And yet, there are still three words, so ordinary…

"You came back."

Evey doesn't smile. V isn't breathing.

It should have been enough.

1. Partridge in a Pear Tree

It is over. Evey is holding him, Evey is crying, Evey is here… Evey is here. And it is something so terrible and sweet and simple that even his unwilling heart swells and before he realizes, everything he swore to keep in is torn out of him in three ragged breaths, but it is too late. It is not enough. She doesn't understand. It has never been enough.

And still, Evey doesn't want him to die…

This time, when V falls, he never stops.

The true beginning of our end - Shakespeare
I actually like the abrupt brevity of the ending. So movie. Many thanks for feedback and Merry Christmas!