Chapter Text
They both walk away.
Villanelle lifts her hand in a small waving gesture, and even from afar Eve can see the playful gleam in her eye. This is ‘see you later’. Not goodbye. Only, Eve doesn’t know when later is—it could be in a week or in a year. Villanelle is good at disappearing. Eve decides to trust her, and waves back. She even offers Villanelle a smile—a parting gift.
And then they walk, and they don’t look back.
Eve would be a liar if she said she didn’t spend every day waiting for Villanelle to return. She’d be a liar if she said she didn’t spend every second of every day just looking for a sign—an apple on her doormat, a lipstick in her purse, a note in her pocket or a teddy bear in her bed. So far there was nothing, only an empty space. She hoped that wherever Villanelle was, she was safe.
The four months since the bridge have been monotonous. She wakes up, she goes to work, she comes home. She watches shitty reality TV shows in the middle of the night, eats old take-out from her fridge and gives herself food poisoning once in a while.
There’s a cat in the creepy alley between her apartment building and the neighboring one. Its fur is ragged and chunks of it are missing, a tooth fell out of its mouth the last time Eve brought it dry-food. Yet the cat is always grooming itself when Eve sees it, trimming its claws and cleaning its face thoroughly. One morning, the cat had gotten into a fight with the much larger one nextdoor. Its fur was bloody and a claw had gone straight through its yellow eye. Still, the cat sat grooming itself—gnawing at tangles in its fur, trimming its nails, scrubbing its face. Always keeping up an appearance for Eve—presumably.
She names the cat Nelle. The cat listens to her name. Her scrawny tail always perks up when Eve says Nelle! and shakes the little bag of kibbles. Eve spends a lot of time in the creepy alleyway that smells like garbage and piss. It’s Nelle’s home, and wherever Nelle goes, Eve follows.
It’s 08:23 in the morning, and like every other day, Eve is trudging along the sidewalk. She visits Nelle every morning before work. Feeds her and talks to her about whatever is on her mind, rubs some antibiotic cream she hopes will help on her festering wounds and knicks.
Eve was walking briskly, in an unusually good mood today. The sky seems bluer, the sun seems brighter. Her phone rings in her coat pocket and she takes it out.
No Caller ID
Her heart thumps in her chest. Could it be…?
Eve nearly trips over something when she puts the phone to her ear. She stops walking, runs a trembling hand through her hair.
“Hello?”
“Eve?”
A familiar voice. A man’s voice.
“Konstantin? Is that you?”
“Yes, yes,” the man grumbles. “Eve, where are you?”
“I’m… on my way to work? Why?”
Why the hell is he calling? Something ugly settles in the pit of her stomach. She knows the words he is about to say before she hears them.
“It’s Villanelle, she’s hurt,” he says, and Eve doesn’t miss the urgency in his voice. “It was The Twelve. I stitched her up and she should be fine, but I need to deal with this and I can’t keep her safe at the same time—you need to take her.”
Eve’s heart pounds in her ears and she stammers into the phone. This was not how she had imagined their reunion.
“Shit, I—yeah, bring her here,” Eve stutters out her address.
“Thank you, Eve. You’d better keep her alive, eh?”
And with that, Konstantin hangs up. Eve shoves her phone back into her pocket. The Bitter Pill can manage a day without her.
Eve looks down at the ground to see what it was she tripped on. Nelle lies dead on the pavement. Eve swallows her vomit and rushes back to her apartment.
Eve is in the middle of a half-hearted attempt to ‘tidy up’ her tiny apartment when there’s a heavy knock on the door. She hears wailing in the hallway and it makes her stomach twist itself into a knot. She opens the door, which she hadn’t been bothered to lock again, and comes face to face with Konstantin.
The burly man is holding Villanelle like a little child, arms wrapped protectively around her. Villanelle is crying, her back quivering with each sob. The knot tightens when Eve sees that her white blouse is shredded, followed by deep gashes from knives that have been stitched together to the best of Konstantin’s abilities. Her hair has been tugged from its neat bun, and it’s caked with blood and dirt. Between sobs Villanelle draws in gasping breaths.
“What the hell happened?”
“What do you think happens when you try to leave The Twelve?” Konstantin snarls, adjusting Villanelle in his arms. “Are you going to let us in?”
Eve swiftly steps out of the way, gesturing to the bed in the corner. “Lay her down on my bed.”
Konstantin stomps past Eve. The older woman sees Villanelle’s face over Konstantin’s shoulder and her breath hitches. Villanelle’s face is bruised, a nasty cut splitting the skin on her forehead. Those weeping eyes catch sight of Eve and widen, and a desperate arm reaches for Eve just before she’s laid down on the bed. Konstantin leans over Villanelle, brushes her blood-soaked hair out of her face. He says something to her, and then he walks towards the door.
“Where are you going!?” Eve throws her arms in the air. “You can’t just—”
“I need to deal with this,” Konstantin says. He reaches into his coat pocket, retrieving a zip-lock bag with pill bottles and a wad of cash. “Money and antibiotics. Every morning, every night, ok?”
“Right…” Eve takes the bag from him. “Will you come back?”
“Maybe,” he stops halfway out the door. “She is fragile, ok? It’s a lot to ask when it comes to her but be patient. She is scared.”
And with that, Konstantin leaves. Eve squeezes the zip-lock bag tightly in her hand and watches Villanelle. She thinks about Nelle. Villanelle is curled up on her side, watching Eve from across the room with teary eyes. She’s gnawing at her fingernails, quivering like a cat caught in rain. She looks so small there in Eve’s bed, so harmless. It takes one look to know that this is not the same Villanelle who stood on that bridge, and it tears Eve apart.
While she stands frozen by the door, Villanelle begins to move. Eve observes as Villanelle anchors herself on wobbly arms. She groans like an animal as she tries to sit, and Eve decides to spring into action before she actually hurts herself. She lays the plastic bag on the counter and walks calmly over to Villanelle.
“I don’t think you should be sitting up,” she says. “Where are you going?”
“M’going…” Villanelle seems to lose her words mid-sentence. Where was she going?
She is so used to being in unsafe places when she is injured—she’s always had to run, always escape even when she could barely stand up. She can never put her trust in someone when she is this vulnerable.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Eve decides. “You’re very hurt, and Konstantin said you need to stay here.”
“Konstantin. Will he be back?”
“I don’t know,” Eve sighs. “He said he needed to deal with this. Whatever ‘this’ is.”
Villanelle’s arms give out under her, and she unceremoniously flops back into the pillows. It drew a whimper from her when the mattress clung to the stitches in her back. She blinked the tears away and put her thumb in her mouth. Eve’s jaw goes a little slack at this, and she crouches down in front of Villanelle.
“What happened after the bridge, Vil?” she asks quietly. Something seemed so fundamentally different about Villanelle, she needed to know.
“I tried really hard, Eef, I promise,” Villanelle croaks. Her throat feels like sandpaper. “I was good and did the jobs. But I didn’t want to, so I told them that and they hurt me bad,” Villanelle sniffles. Her lip trembles. “They hurt me on the outside and they hurt my heart on the inside.”
Eve is taken aback by how childish Villanelle’s response is. She talks about her feelings like she is at least twenty years younger.
Maybe her emotions never developed past that, Eve thinks. That would explain a lot.
“You tried to get out after the bridge, huh?”
“Mm-hmm,” Villanelle puts her thumb in her mouth again, sucking audibly on it. “Tried.”
Eve can’t decide if she’s very surprised or not at all. Villanelle loves killing. She loves her job, the violence and the money and all the privileges The Twelve has bestowed upon her. But Eve was starting to realize that was a narrow way to view Villanelle. Like she had said on the bridge; you’re so many things. No matter how good she was at her job, machine was not one of them. In the ballroom Villanelle had been sad. She was thinking about what else she could’ve been. She seemed almost remorseful. There were tears in her eyes and Eve knew that something, whatever it may be, had rattled Villanelle to the core.
When Villanelle first came to her house, all crocodile-tears and pouty lips—Eve, I have nowhere to go, I need help— Eve didn’t believe her for a second.
That Villanelle wasn’t the same Villanelle as the one on the bridge, and this Villanelle wasn’t the same as any of those past versions.
God, she’s like a matryoshka doll. Lift the lid off one doll and you reveal the next.
The dolls grow smaller and smaller. Eve wondered how many lids and faces had been cracked open to reveal this version of Villanelle.
“I’m sorry,” Eve reaches out to ever so gently caress Villanelle’s bruised cheek. “I’m sorry they did this to you.”
“Deserved it,” Villanelle mumbles, picking at her chapped lips. “Was bad.”
“You did not deserve this, Villanelle, what makes you think that?” Eve’s voice is low, and she’s unaware of how close she’s shifted.
“I didn’t—didn’t listen,” she hiccups. “They said what they would do if I tried to leave and I—I still tried.”
Villanelle is crying now, tiny broken sobs into Eve’s pillow, snot running from her red nose. Eve feels overwhelmed, she’s never seen Villanelle like this before. How does one soothe a crying assassin? How does one soothe a person with fangs and sharp claws without being mauled in the process?
The younger woman is sucking on her thumb, her body trembling with each gasping breath she inhales. Eve changes her thinking. How does one soothe a child?
You hold them close, and you kiss their scraped knees, and you tell them it’s okay.
The mattress dips as Eve sits down. She maneuvers her hands under Villanelle’s arms and carefully lifts the crying girl up and into her embrace. Villanelle stops crying from surprise when she finds herself cradled in the older woman’s arms. Her belly quivers with residual sobs, and she sniffles loudly. Eve just holds her for a bit; her arms feel strong and secure. Tears spill from Oksana’s eyes when Eve runs her fingers through her hair.
“It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”
Villanelle looks at her in disbelief, like she can’t fathom that Eve is here. Eve can’t entirely fathom that Villanelle is here either. Then again, it’s so very Villanelle to make an utterly chaotic reappearance in Eve’s life.
Eve looked into Villanelle’s eyes. Those glossy pools of hazel, so sad and innocent.
Oksana, said something within Eve. This is Oksana.
Eve’s body moves on its own accord. She adjusts Oksana in her arms, letting her rest her weary head in the crook of her breast and arm. She presses the pad of her thumb against Oksana’s bottom lip. Oksana takes it into her mouth. Eve’s thumb brushes against sharp teeth, and a warm, soft tongue wraps around it. Oksana begins to suck on Eve’s finger, hands curling in the older woman’s button-down. Her breathing begins to even out, those beautiful eyes turning milky and calm for a second.
Eve releases the breath she was holding, taking in the sight she held in her arms. It felt surreal to hold Villanelle like this. So much power bubbled under the surface of her marred skin, it was like holding a feral cat in her embrace. At any moment it could turn, Villanelle could bite down on her thumb and have Eve on her back in seconds. But she wouldn’t do any of that, and she needed someone to trust that she wouldn’t.
“I’ve got you, ok? I’ve got you,” Eve says. “You’re safe here, Vil. I’ll take care of you.”