Chapter Text
Eve sits at a cafe with flakes of blood underneath her fingernails.
Her hands tremble, heavy with the weight of adrenaline she no longer needs. It lingers in her blood — makes her look around, searching for a fight she has already won both minutes and decades before this moment.
Her mission, she no longer remembers. All she knew was that she had done what she was meant to; tear through the knots in the braids of time, and then braid it all over again. Sometimes, she has to do nothing more but point somebody in the right direction — but her expertise is in the dirty work, and, all too often, there is much more required of her than the simple flap of a butterfly’s wings.
She doesn't ask questions.
She pretends she does not care for the answers.
As she gestures to the waiter for the menu, he smiles, and she smiles back. Though there is an innate ordinariness to the interaction, she feels more than a little sick when he turns his head.
Eve has started to feel sick often. It comes and goes: sometimes in short, vivid bursts, and sometimes in long and relentless waves.
Though it feels like the end of something she cannot place, it is the idea of a beginning that breathes life to her curiosity — and the more curious she is, the more sick she finds herself.
It is the kind of sickness she feels may kill her, if she lets it.
She isn’t hungry because she doesn’t need to be, but there is an ache in the pit of her stomach she can convince herself is hunger, and so she does — reaches with outstretched hands for the menu, and forgets not to flinch when she makes the barest of contact with the waiter as he hands her a slip of paper; far too light for what it is supposed to be.
Eve knows before she knows, then, and when she unfolds the letter, she smiles. The muscles in her cheeks strain with the effort of the one thing she has never deigned to practice nor perfect, but she does not care. She smiles for herself. She smiles for the letter. She smiles for her enemy, and, in some strange way, she smiles for her friend.
Dearest Eve,
You intend to decipher me— a task I would have never once hoped I would hope for an enemy to succeed. I have tried to conjure an intention of equal difficulty, but, unfortunately, the only one I had was the desire to one-up you in terms of the delivery of my letter. I hope it finds you when you had just started to forget about me, though I do sympathise with the impossibility of such a task.
I do remember you. Would it flatter you to know I have thought about you, in more than strategics? Thought about the way you would watch me, and the ways in which I would pretend not to know. I like it when I feel your gaze on me. Do you like the feel of it, now — me watching you, as you read this?
I’m only joking, so there’s no need to turn around (but if I hadn’t have been, I would have asked the same question anyway)!
Perhaps I lied about having only one intention — I do intend to watch you, but for my own needs only. It would bring me something unfamiliar to see you in a moment of peace: the sort of something I would be told, by the Commandants, to file away for further inspection.
I should listen to them, too. If you are dangerous to them, you are something uniquely threatening to me — but if you are my shadow, I take great pleasure in knowing I can hurt you in the very same ways.
Perhaps that is why I have indulged you in this little game: both you and I are the only two who know how to win.
Those are odd things you associate with me. Though I often find myself assigned to cases in Winter (was it merely a clever way of saying you know more of me than I have previously cared to know of you?), I have always found myself taking great pleasure in the autumn months. When you have the time, which I will presume you have little of and presume, all the same, you will reserve for me anyway, there is a town at its best in strand C-84421, called Knaresborough. It is not a spectacular beauty like the places both you and I have seen often, but it is quiet, and peaceful, and the sort of place I wish I had the chance to catch my breath in.
Visit it, in the Autumn months, if you can, and think of me—call it Pavlovian conditioning, if you must, but I have every wish to sever the tie you have created between myself and winter and instead create one entirely my own.
That, and it would simply make me very happy to know you consider the beauty of that little town in the same way you consider me.
You speak of the absence of loneliness. Is this what you suppose we are to each other? We are alike in the ways we were always intended not to be — your greatness is my greatness. By extension, I will assume that my sickness is your sickness, too.
And, to answer your question: yes, I am capable of retaining memories. I find it peculiar you think it a solely human trait, the same way you do not think of me as human at all. Are we not made human? Or do you think it must be earned, as I have, in times of wavering faith?
I know it must surprise you to hear me confess such a thing. So imperfect. So human. Even the most perfect of creatures, of which I have been told, by many, I am (have you? I would consider it a heinous crime if not even one person has complimented you in such a way, though it would greatly ease my pain if I were to be able to consider myself the first to do so), can falter. Even the finest machinery can and will, one day, break — and I have lived more days than most machines ever will.
Perhaps it is this affinity to doubt that makes us such fine soldiers. We can question corruption in the way the blind cannot: who better to follow the most important of orders than those who know how to understand them?
Though, of course, we are weavers first, soldiers second. The best at what we do. You braid time with a gentle hand: I cut through it, with no care as to what I break in the process. It is an oddly beautiful thing, isn’t it? That such different methods end with such similar results? If I did have the choice to go back, though, and train myself again, I would do so with the memory of you.
I do hope, with nothing but my own foolishness, this time, that you reserve that time for me. Perhaps, if you ask nicely of me, I will find my own for you.
With many regrets,
Villanelle
P.S. Have you figured out my cipher, or have I found myself too confident in your skill?
Villanelle.
Vil-la-nelle.
It sounds like poetry on her tongue, even though she does dare not say it aloud. She can practically feel the name lodge itself in her throat— determined to be set free, as much as she is determined to keep it safely in her body.
The letter, though light, feels impossibly heavy in her hands: heavy with the weight, the gravity, of time itself— the very thing she was born to wield. It feels unfamiliar, now, when presented to her from the hands of another. Such unfamiliarity in a life full of knowledge should make her afraid.
It should. But it doesn’t.
She leaves the waiter a fifty dollar bill when she is confident she can remember the words — she reads them like she would read a holy book, and when she is done, she still clings to it with the same ferocity she clings to her own sanity.
Eve has every intention of following Villanelle’s request, in the same way a preacher would follow a prayer. She thinks, with her hands unclean and her mind muddied, of the town she described: there is a visceral craving in her to see it, commit it to memory in the same way she has her letter. It is sickness made real— to want something so much.
And yet, in the end, she does not have to save, nor find, time. It is given to her.
She thinks idly of coincidence, even though the Twelve laugh in the face of it — it is irony , then, that brings her to Knaresborough, not for an enemy who had intended to bring her to the town in an act of rebellion, but for her work.
She enters Strand C-84421 with nothing but a blade in her back pocket, and a letter pressed against her breast. She has kept it there since the day she was given it — as if, somehow, the organ underneath may find a way to consume it.
In the many, hundreds of years that will pass since the one Eve stands in, this cave will be known as Mother Shipton's Cave. Tourists will sully the area and think of the past: they will not think of what nearly had been, because it will never have existed. That is the beauty of her work — she erases things that do not exist, yet, to be erased. She is the thing before the chicken and the egg and the notion of life itself.
The cave will be famous, one day, but now? It is nothing more than a cave.
Her footsteps are light, though they do not need to be. Old Mother Shipton knows each twig and stone and ounce of mud that she walks through, and every strand of hair in every braid that is out of place. She can see, when she should be blind.
That is why Eve is here.
“You’re here to kill me.”
The old woman stands at the entrance of her cavern, expectant. Her hands are callused and wrinkled — she is the oldest woman in her town, and still, her age brings her nothing but fear. She has been called a witch, a demon, a soothsayer, but never once has anybody called her what she truly is: a harbinger.
Eve does not need to nod.
The woman sighs, then, and seems to deflate. She can see, in the action, how tense she was from a life defined by persecution, and the relief of an end: she can see it, because she has lived it.
“I see….shadows, on you, child.”
She pulls out the blade.
“I’m not a child.”
“Oh, but you are. You have not known age. You have not known life.”
Shipton is silent, for a moment, and then flashes her a smile of rotten teeth and bleeding gums — the smile speaks of all the things she cannot see, but she can see, in that mouth, the disease of sight: that what she is doing, what she has been told to do, is nothing less than mercy.
Such knowledge can only be a curse. She is setting her free; cutting her loose as much as she is cutting this braid.
“But you will.”
Eve advances slowly. She does not need to — perhaps she is curious to see if the woman will run. Perhaps there is something predatory in her, and she aches to sate it.
Or, perhaps, she is giving her the chance to live.
She does not take it.
Her body, she throws in the well. It will take somewhere around six months for the body to turn to stone, but it hardly matters — nobody will look for her. They think her a curse upon the land, and by the time they do find her, she will be more legend than she had ever been living .
When she is done, she walks through the streets, and lets herself think, only for a moment, of what it must feel like to be able to walk and have nowhere in the world to go.
And she thinks of her.
She disposes of the letter, in the end, in 18th century Shanghai, three hundred years before the day in which it was given to her. Though she should burn it, as Villanelle had with her own, she feels a compulsion to do something else entirely — a compulsion that feels like breathing, or the beat of her own heart. She feels the craving in the same way she feels her own body : it is something she understands, even if she does not understand the understanding.
When she buries the paper in the ground, it is not blood that dirties her nails, but dirt.
Eve takes special care, in the days after, not to wash her hands.