Chapter Text
At first it is disorientating, the softness of your bed at once familiar and not, so too the expression on her lovely face, both of which probably blurred by time and memory.
What feels the same is the tip of the knife, firm and insistent against your stomach, and despite everything there is a part of you that wants to lean into it. To leave this moment unchanged, to let yourself truly see her for the first time again, to let her inside you for the first time again–
But that really would defeat the purpose of this whole misadventure.
So where you had unintentionally (intentionally?) goaded her in the past, this time you force yourself to resist the urge, instead ignoring the sharp tip of her blade pressed against your stomach and lean in to kiss her.
Her mouth feels the same, the tickle of her hair against your cheek, the slight intake of breath as you deepen the kiss all of it threatening to pull you back to another kiss, another time and you wonder whether all that will fall between you between this moment and the river makes this woman a different Eve than the one you now ache so desperately for.
Something tightens in your chest at the thought and you force it away– how like you to try and sabotage your own good fortune, to pick apart whatever has allowed you these second, third, forth, whatever number chances but then her tongue presses against yours and the thought is gone–
You tangle fingers in her hair to brush it away from your faces and your fingers curl gently around the shell of her ear as she breaks off to take a breath, the space away from her mouth leaves a horrible openness that you want to fill with words of love dripping with such devotion that you don’t think that even your Eve, who had lived through all the same history as you have, could stomach them. Thankfully she doesn’t pause for long and a leg is thrown over your hip emptying your mind of treacherous thoughts once more.
Your hands reach out to the bend of her knees as she leans over you and you run them up the back of her thighs to settle on her hips. She leans down to kiss you again and that's when you become aware of it–the knife.
You’ve been kissing for minutes now but somehow you hadn’t realised that it remained pressed to your stomach. Not that you mind the idea of it generally, but really these things ought to be negotiated first, and anyway is knife play really what you want from this moment? The first time you’ve been allowed to touch her again since the awful weight of the river wedged itself between you?
You reach out to uncurl her fingers still tightly wound around the handle and you feel the exact moment she comes back to herself. Her mouth pulls sharply from yours and her body tenses before scrambling to sit upright above you, her legs still spread over your hips.
But if the touch of her mouth on yours was familiar, perhaps more so is the feeling that whatever gains you think you had made– they were about to be pulled from under you.
“No– Eve– it’s ok–” Your voice sounds odd to your own ears and her eyes widen with horror as she looks down on you beneath her. It's enough to make the moment, and all the possibilities that came along with feel like sand slipping beneath you.
You try again to take the knife, “It’s ok– please– I’ll give you what you want–” Her eyes harden in warning but you can’t stop yourself sliding your hand from her hip to the top of her thigh, “please– let me– you don’t want to do that, not now–”
Before you even finish speaking you know that it's the absolute wrong thing to say.
“I don’t?” She asks and you can hear all the anger at your presumption to tell her how she feels just the same way as the first time around.
You must look caught in the headlights for a second because you can see satisfaction gleaming in her expression and despite it all you can't help but find her beautiful, just like the first time.
When the knife goes in you can immediately feel that it's different. Its higher for one thing, her thighs are pressed right where the old wound would be, but more than that its deeper–
The white hot pain shoots through you and you distantly register the sound of an anguished cry coming from your throat. All of that is secondary to your focus on watching every emotion playing out on her face above you– anger, shock, fear, pity– all of them moving so fast that if nothing else you are grateful to experience this again just to catalogue every moment of how this felt for her.
She pulls the blade, just as she did before and you know that this time you really are going to die, just as you did in the water. She presses her hand to the wound and you watch as your blood pours between her fingers– it hurts less? Or maybe more? Honestly you aren’t sure, it feels cold just like the water did but this time you can at least hold her as it happens.
You use every ounce of concentration to lift your hand placing it tightly over hers, hoping that it will ensure that this time you do not die alone. Your hand flaps down against hers, your fingers unwilling to work in the way you want them too and suddenly this feels just the same as the water, no closer to what you want– an Eve who is able to give you what you need a final memory of her lacing her fingers together with yours.
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It takes you a minute to come back to yourself, to know that blood is not pouring from a gaping wound on your stomach– to remember that you aren’t dying alone all over again.
You take a breath.
Fuck.
Ok, so the first thing you went back to fix was clearly the wrong one.
You’re big enough to admit it.
Or you would be if he weren’t wearing the most obnoxiously smug expression as you sit beside each other on the couch and watching on the television screen in front of you, as blood spreads across the tastefully distressed floorboards of your Parisian apartment.
“Wow.” Bill says.
You push down a sudden stupid urge to cry remembering that you have an audience and pull on a well worn mask of playful indifference.
“What? How was I supposed to know kissing her would actually make her better at stabbing?”
“Remind me how many people she killed without you riling her up first?” He asks, making his amusement plain.
You exhale through your nose and roll your eyes.
He makes a good point.
“Fine,” you concede, just shy of gracious, and watch as he leans back on the sofa looking entirely amused by the whole thing.
How rude. No wonder Eve felt some kind of affinity with this person.
“Not as easy as you thought then I take it?”
You briefly consider whether you could go back and change all your supreme confidence that you’d get it right the first time, that you didn’t need his words of caution to really think about what to change and why.
You close your eyes, exhale through your nose and rub your fingers over your forehead. He was right. Of course he was, because when something sounds too good to be true, that's usually because it is. And that is just how this had seemed– nine chances to go back, nine do overs, nine opportunities to ensure you never had to go into the water.
At first you’d been sceptical.
“You know I’ve killed a lot of people, right?” You’d asked, genuinely wondering whether he recognised you because if you are being fair your hair is very much blonder now than it was when you murdered him so–
But then he raised his eyebrows and looked at you as if you were stupid, “Yes– I’m aware.”
Perhaps unconsciously he had put a hand to the top of his chest where the wounds must have been and it made you feel surprisingly awkward. But you shook it off and listened as he set it all out for you.
You’d died in the water that much you knew, but apparently this is what came next– an antiseptic room with the feel of a dentist's waiting room, white textured wallpaper and carpet squares glued down beneath your feet, a sofa just the wrong side of slouchy facing an old style big back television screen. Not quite the fire and brimstone reception that you had imagined, a surprise particularly after the crucifying drag Jesus thing– and, oh– probably also the whole assassin thing too– so yeah, safe to say that none of this is what you expected.
But apparently none of that mattered and how delicious it would have been to see the faces of the congregation at St Marks when they realised that you, with your lifetime of…… morally questionable decisions were treated just the same as anyone and given this chance to put it all right and get what you wanted despite everything.
All you had to do was pick wisely and listen to the occasional glib comment from him– so yeah– of course it had sounded easy.
You run your fingers across the scar on your stomach, ok so you probably could have given it some more thought before going back to that moment in Paris. But– come on! You were excited! How were you supposed to have predicted that reaction? Well. Ok. You are prepared to concede that you might have if you’d let your thoughts run further than it being the quickest way to get her mouth back on yours again.
It’s not a mistake you’ll make again.
“What happens if I use all nine and don’t like any of them?” You ask, knowing that you can’t manipulate the rules if you don’t understand them.
“Then you’ll have cocked it up.” He replies in a bored tone.
You snort in response to his frankness and turn away to drum your fingers against your chin in thought. You might have wasted the first chance but you can’t waste the second, because if you get this right you might never have to go into the water at all. You briefly remember the horror on her face as she watched the blood seep through your clothes the first time, the hatred on her face in Rome, the agony of missing her fingers by inches– if you get it right none of that shitty stuff has to happen at all.
And that’s it– that's when it comes to you. Trying to change just Paris didn’t work because of everything which came before it. Obviously!!
Honestly you’re kind of annoyed with yourself that you didn’t work it out faster.
You’ll just go back to the very start.
“Fine. Ok– I have my next one– send me back to the bathroom, back to when I first saw her–”
Excitement starts to fizz at the thought of it, meeting her without any of the baggage, falling in love with her all over again, getting to watch her fall in love with you.
He exhales through his nose and wears that expression again as if you are an idiot.
You frown in response, prepare a withering reply but before you are able to speak, reality or whatever this is, dissolves around you, everything goes dark and you are pulled back into your past again.