An Encounter

Disclaimer: V for Vendetta is owned by Alan Moore, DC Comics and Warner Bros. Inc. I'm not making any money off of this, just borrowing V for a bit.

AN: A one-shot spawned from an intriguing question a friend had asked me after seeing VFV for the fourth time. Much much thanks to my friends for reading through this and being my ego boosters.

An Encounter

"Oh, dear God, have mercy!" Lilliman gasped, realisation dawning... a realisation more sickening than the pain.

"Not tonight, Bishop," V pronounced, the words a sentence too final to appeal. "Not tonight."

---

Jane Weatherby withdrew her sidearm. She wasn't about to be done in like the guards outside, each knifed in the chest before they could draw their guns and left to bleed out on the wet flagstones. At least she might have a chance, might surprise whatever man or devil hid beneath the white mask, might return to her desk at New Scotland Yard, might live to see her cat again...

Will have a chance, she amended and the fingers of her left hand curled ever-tighter around the grip of not her gun, but her wand. Wand in the left and gun in the right, the former hidden at her side and the latter held firm before her as she crept, silently and swiftly, down the stone corridor. She never used it anymore, not really, not since joining the force so very long ago, when even spells seemed useless against the new terrors the world had offered up. Voldemort, a name no longer uttered and perhaps even no longer remembered in the magical side of Britain, now seemed a farce. In the aftermath of biological warfare, Avada Kedavra was almost merciful. An old friend would have said the irony was horrifically brilliant.

"'If we are mark'd to die, we are enow to do our country loss; and if to live, the fewer men, the greater share of honour,'" he had declared one evening so long ago in a rich, properly Shakespearean voice, reading aloud from Henry V after she'd thrown it at his head in a fit of pique.

"You could stand to learn something from him," she'd said, with that bossy, no-nonsense tone that her friends had come to learn brooked no refusal. An end to the war was in sight, what they had hoped would result in the reclamation of Hogwarts would be set into motion in a few hours and so he'd read to them bits of Henry's St Crispin's Day speech.

"'What feats he did that day: then shall our names. Familiar in his mouth as household words the king-'"

He'd never thought himself a king. A soldier perhaps, marching off to war, ready to die for the cause, for his friends, for the hope that others could soon live unafraid.

"'Herald, save thou thy labour; come thou no more for ransom, gentle herald: they shall have none.'"

Then he did die. That was years later, so suddenly too, he had only just completed his long-overdue training at St Mungo's when the accident happened. At least, she had thought when his ashes were interred beside his parent's, he didn't have to die on the battlefield.

Later his death would seem an omen, when the world as they all knew it slowly, assuredly crumbled. The tides had turned and the threat was greater, too great it seemed and soon the alias she had taken, the role she played in her search for information, became permanent.

Ahead of her in the corridor, light spilled from a doorway and she knew she was coming to the end of her search in the Abbey, a thought that would have made Trelawney proud in its apparent clairvoyant quality when the figure that emerged from the illuminated room was none other than the man she'd prayed to survive an encounter with.

"Stop right there, put your hands up," Jane ordered, a command that was perhaps unnecessary as V had followed it to the letter even before she'd spoken. That mask, even with its moulded grin, still reminded her of other masks, featureless and stark white and set beneath not a Jacobean hat, but a pointed hood. Her fingers clamped more tightly upon the handle of her wand, palm slick with cold sweat.

"You've been busy," she continued, voice unwavering, strong in the still air. "First Lewis Prothero and I suppose that's Father Lilliman in there. That's not all though, is it? There was Owen Patterson a year ago, you poisoned him as well and there were others..." Trailing off, Jane shifted her weight slightly as though readying herself for attack; she expected the statue-like figure to spring into action at her pronouncement. An Immobulus would make that impossible for him, she knew, giving that idea considerable thought.

"Busy?" V inclined his head slightly, his tone idly contemplative, as though this was a simple conversation and he was not a masked terrorist and she was not an inspector with a hair trigger. "Well yes, I have been. However, clearly I have not been unaccompanied in my clandestine investigations. It seems you have laboured with an intensity I should have expected from you. But tell me, Inspector Weatherby, now that you have me, what will you do with me?"

The use of her name surprised her and Jane visibly stiffened. Calm. Be calm. 'Investigations', he could have the names of everyone at Scotland Yard if he's been planning this for years.

Weaving his web like a spider.

She was not about to be cowed, however. She had seen war, she had seen death, she had seen the very worst and the very best that humans were capable of and Jane squared her shoulders, mouth pressed into a thin line. "You're coming with me, lad. I know what you're doing and I'll even wager a guess as to why. But I'll be taking you in to headquarters - I can't allow you to kill anyone else."

"'Bid them achieve me and then sell my bones.'" V's hands fell from the air, setting his cape gently rippling, seeming almost a part of the shadows at his feet. "'Herald, save thou thy labour. Come thou no more for ransom, gentle herald,'" he continued and though she could not see his eyes, she still felt their gaze upon her, piercing as any sharp needle. Listen, listen...

"'They shall have none, I swear, but these my joints! Which if they have as I shall leave of them, shall yield them little.'"

Henry V. And the next line...

"You read the herald then, Ron." He passed the book to his ginger-haired friend with a grin. The Weasley promptly rolled his eyes, scanning the page for a second before he found what came next.

"'I shall, King Harry. And so fare thee well: thou never shalt hear herald any more.'"

Jane's wand clattered when it hit the floor, rolling to rest in a groove between the flagstones.

"No..."

He grinned at her, round spectacles magnifying those bright green eyes.

"Not a bad choice, Hermione."

With a blurring flourish the figure before her bowed and at once unclasped his cape, reversing it in a whirl of black which shimmered unexpectedly into liquid silver. He was gone within a flicker-flash, leaving her staggering, shell-shocked... and shrieking.

"HARRY!"