Reborn

He'd always had a talent for surviving anything the world had to throw at him. The doctors had called him extraordinary as the ranks of their subjects dwindled and he remained alive. A miracle, they said, and poked and prodded him even more until he couldn't remember his name - he used the Roman numeral on his door. Until he couldn't remember where he came from, and made agony his hearthstone. We want to know your limits, they said as he screamed; we want to know how far the human body can go.

On a night of fire and pain and panic, they set in motion just how far he would go. They tried to erase all the evidence, but he refused to be erased - he would not fade with history and memory. Even though the darkness called so sweetly, he would not be swayed. Because these things that called themselves humans and heroes and saviours could not be allowed to continue the subjugation of His people.

So he waited, and planned, and waited until the rot was clear to all who cared to look, and then he made them look. Monster he may be, but he was the sword that would strike down those far worse, the shield to protect the innocent masses from reprisal. He wasn't innocent, never had been. Never would be. So he had died for the ideal, the idea of freedom.

He'd never died before, not quite. But in Evey's arms, handing over the decision to someone who was inside the system but had also been outside and could make the decision without vengeful hatred colouring their perspective, full of the bullets of Mister Creedy's most loyal - he gave in to the blackness.

And then he woke up. He remembered. In the clarity of the agony he was born in, he remembered all the other times he'd died for a cause that was just, for a people who could and would be so much more. He remembered the man who wasn't a man, the girl who had been Time, his loves and his losses. And this time he didn't cry, because by now he knew that's how it was, and he had made peace with his fate.

And in the rubble of Parliament House, an undying man who had been called many names and made someone else's his own started to climb out of the tomb of his own making into another new world.