Work Text:
“Tell me about yourself.”
“My sordid past.”
“Anything. How did you start working for your current employer?”
“I found a listing on LinkedIn. I went in for an interview. First, there was a group interview, and we had to play a little game of putting our last names in alphabetical order without saying a word--”
“This was your idea.”
“Fine. There were stages to it.”
“Tell me about them.”
“Why don’t you wear lipstick?”
“What happened first?”
First, she will go back.
First, she learns.
She learns how her tongue responds to the things it is pressed against: cold cement, or the inner ring of a gun barrel, or the metallic wet of an open wound, not unlike the metallic wet of other open things, or someone else’s tongue.
She doesn’t have to learn how to kill. She just has to learn to kill better. Faster. More efficiently.
“Efficiency is overrated,” she says. The sting of a hand across her face.
“In Russian.”
She smiles, blood smeared from her lip to her chin.
“But you want me to speak English.”
A knife carefully opens her mouth, slides noisily against her canines, its blunt end lodged in the gap between her front teeth. “Listen and respect.”
She brings her tongue up to the blade, letting them be the ones to withdraw the knife in surprise, see them unsure of what to do with the girl who willingly made herself bleed and did not shy away from their idea of a threat. She grins, her teeth turning pink. “Make up your minds. Cockteases.”
A label is for a jar. Or a dress. Particularly the silk ones that zip up the back.
Here is why she sleeps with men: usually, this will allow her to get something from them. They will give over something she previously would have had to take.
Also, they are easy. They are predictable. They typically understand a system in which no one expects anything of the other. Some even respect her more for it. The ones that do not are usually not given the opportunity to learn from their mistake, but it’s fine. The itch is always simple to scratch. The urge is less an urge than a necessary chore to prevent something from becoming irritating. A rubbish bag to take out. A bin to empty. A mess to sweep. A man to fuck.
Here is why she sleeps with women: she cannot help herself.
A woman is irresistible, most of the time. A puzzle housed in a taut knot within a flaming chamber spinning on the point of a sharpened knife. Certain death in a finger’s curl. Complex, drawn to rituals whether consciously or subconsciously, vicious gentle creatures capable of drawing blood. A woman is a challenge. She loves challenges. And somehow it has only ever been women who have taken the kind of delight she takes in killing in tearing her apart, one way or another.
If someone asked, she wouldn’t answer. What does it matter? What did psychopath matter? What did criminal matter? What did victim matter? What did murderer matter? What did any of it matter?
People are stupid and useless.
That’s the second part of her training. She knew this already, but it was almost like she knew it without believing it. Now she believes it wholeheartedly. Most people are stupid. Most people will slow you down if given the chance. You will not be able to live fully if you allow other people to interfere with your life.
Or your job.
Some people can be interesting. Intelligent, even useful. Some are games. Some are entertaining, usually in the moments before they die.
She can make exceptions for individuals. Exceptions are dangerous for her. They typically lead to distractions. She loves distractions. The people she works for do not love distractions. What they don’t know rarely hurts them. Sometimes it hurts her. But she’s hardly bothered by a little hurting.
In prison, it had been relatively easy to deal with problems.
There were two ways to go about it:
She used strategy to turn the other girls against the problem until they took care of it for her.
Or, she seriously harmed the problem using cleverly crafted tools, or her environment.
Eve had tried to bring up prison. Being hurt, castrating the man -- did he hurt you, you can tell me, what did he do?
Her past was like the problem in prison. Relatively easy to deal with. Only two ways to answer.
She usually lied about such things. But if she wanted to tell the truth, that wasn’t awful either - yes, of course, he’d hurt her. Of course, castrating was personal. But she was going to kill him either way, regardless of if he ever hurt her, regardless of his moral center, regardless of the actions that eventually led her to stop halfway through tearing his throat open, sitting on his chest, considering her options, and then letting him stay alive and conscious as she sliced it off and stuffed it into his mouth.
What would Eve have said when she explained that she’d kissed him on the cheek, finished opening his throat, and whispered “bon appétit”?
She did not know. That was why she made an exception.
For the ones she could not predict, she always made an exception.
Eve wanted such an act to be special. Frank was meant to prove that it wasn't special. Nothing is special. The dress isn't special. Cocks aren't special.
People can be special, though. She has made an effort to prove that Eve is special.
And she wants to fuck her.
Well, she wants the woman to want her to fuck her.
That is already the case, actually. Abundantly clear in a myriad of ways, none of which she is sure the woman would ever admit to herself.
But she wants the woman to want her to fuck her and want to go through with it. And maybe continue to want it and continue to go through with it. Establish an arrangement. See through an end that she couldn’t envision yet. A much more complex circumstance.
Things would need to align perfectly to allow it to happen. It would be nearly impossible, beautiful beyond belief. Like art.
Who is she kidding? She wants to fuck her stupidly. Against a wall if she could. Sloppy fucking. Low art. Neatly pornographic.
She shoves a man out of her bed. Not close enough, not even with her eyes closed and him in Eve's stockings.
Smokes on her balcony. Eats chocolates on the floor. Cleans all of her guns. Masturbates for a full hour. Smokes another cigarette.
“Those will kill you,” Konstatin says, seeing the smoke coming in through the cracked glass doors.
She breaks into laughter on the other side, dropping her cigarette onto the neighbor’s plants.
“They are deadly,” he says, shrugging. He is holding a file.
“I’m deadly.”
“You want to die early?”
“Ideally.”
“Fine, then. But you won’t be able to run as fast.”
“I hate running.”
“Perfect for you, then.” He eyes her brand, slim and French and pastel. “These are pussy sticks.”
“You like your old Soviet ones that are like sucking tar. I wonder why.” She raises her eyebrows. “I like my pussy sticks. I wonder why.”
The file comes down on the table. “Don’t do anything that threatens your health.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t kill people, then.”
A woman pauses while she rides her, her hips freezing in place.
“My name is not Eve,” she says. “My name is--”
A hand covering her mouth. “Your name is Eve.”
“It’s--”
“No,” she says, sitting up, removing her other hand and ignoring the woman’s pleasant little squeak. “You are Eve.”
“But now I want you to call me by my name.” The woman bends down to cup her cheek, try to kiss her. She fans the woman’s dark hair around her head, twists and pins her to the bed.
“Don’t be difficult, Eve.”
The woman rolls her eyes. “Fine. I am Eve.”
“Oh, rolling your eyes is good. Be exasperated.”
“Just shut up and fuck me.”
“Yes, like that. Perfect.”
Konstantin tells her to kill Nadiya. Well, that’s fucking stupid. Because Nadiya’s dead. She checked. What, he thinks she would just drive off? She professionally kills other humans for a living. He thinks she wouldn’t confirm a fucking kill? She also saw Nadiya’s skull burst like a pumpkin under the weight of her tire. She’s aware of what a human being can and cannot return from. Having one’s brains crushed to a fine pulp while your eyes flatten to either side of the plane formerly known as a face is not a survivable scenario.
So Konstantin is setting her up. Fine. She assumed as much a while ago.
She goes to “Russia”. “Russia” is now London. If he is capable of following her, he’s a hundred times the man she thinks he is. He’s not, though. He is as useless as the rest of them. At the end of the day, he slowed her down. Now he won’t slow anyone down.
In London, her appetite is voracious. Bottomless coffee as she follows Eve from one place to another. Anything she can sink her teeth into while keeping her eyes on the woman, she’s eating, distracted, messy. At night, once the lights in the windows have turned off, the silhouette has disappeared, she’s finding woman after woman, taking them back to the apartment, devouring them like an animal. Or a monster from a children’s story, swallowing girls whole, luring them and making them disappear.
The right one would be clever enough to find her way back out. Slay the sleeping beast. Villanelle would be slain willingly, gleefully.
“Be rough,” the woman says.
“No,” she says, choosing not to overthink this. “I want to be gentle.”
“Seriously,” an American accent. “I told you my safe word. Just get as rough as you want. Honestly, the pain is a turn on.”
She presses her forehead into the place between the woman’s breasts, grits her teeth. “Fine.”
And a few hours later, when the milky white dawn is peering over East London -- “You are never going to get your Airbnb deposit back.”
She sighs. “I know.”
Eve seeing her, freezing in place at the bus stop. Villanelle waving from across the street.
Villanelle smiling.
“You can’t possibly be stupid enough to do this.”
She runs her fingers along the grain of the bench, smooths down her nails. “What do you think I am doing, Eve?”
“You’re toying with me.”
“I’d be toying with you if I was going to kill you at some point. I already told you that I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You fucked with me last time. The sob story--”
“I wasn’t fucking with you.”
Eve lets out an exasperated noise. “So it was a test? To see if I’d fucking fall for it?”
“I knew you wouldn’t fall for it. But I didn’t know how you’d react to what you interpreted as an attempt to trick you. So I wanted to see.” She shrugs. “You are overreacting now.”
“Literally nothing I have done since you showed up has been an overreaction. This is how normal humans react to people dying. Danger. The possibility of being hurt. These are all very normal responses.”
“Normal.” She makes a face. “Why do people assume that word can be weaponized?”
“What do you want?”
“I want to tell you about myself.” She hands her the tape recorder. Their fingers touch. Villanelle makes eye contact. Smiles. Oh, yes. Like art. “Ask me questions. I will answer honestly. This is what you’ve wanted since the beginning, isn’t it? You wanted to know who I am. How I do it. Who I work for. I can give you that.”
“Why would you do that?”
“They fucked me over. I’m going to fuck them over. I’ll let you have a piece, if you’re nice.”
There’s a good minute of silence that passes between them. She gives Eve that time to process. Weigh her options. She hopes, like a girl, a little girl in Chelyabinsk who can stand barefoot even in the snow, she is one of them.
“Fine.”
“So you will ask me questions?”
“If you stay on topic.”
“What would I do, Eve? I always stay on topic.”
“Don’t hit on me.”
She raises an eyebrow.
“Who does that?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“No, I don’t. You might need to clarify.”
“If you hit on me, I’m done.”
“You’re the only one that benefits from this.”
“So don’t be a dick.”
She would never, if she is honest. She isn’t a disrespectful psychopath. She is just a psychopath.
“I will not be a dick, Eve.”
“Thank you.”
“I only have one request.” She puts up her hands. “And then I’m done, I promise you.”
“What is it?”
“Can we do the interview over wine?”
“What did I just say?”
“It isn’t romantic wine. It is just normal wine.”
“Nothing with you is normal.”
“This wine bar is more private. No one will pay attention.” She smirks. “I assume you don’t want to invite me back to your home.”
“You don’t need invitations, apparently. You just let yourself in.”
“I won’t do that again.”
“Why are you pretending to be chivalrous with me?”
“Why are you suspicious of everything I do?”
“I don’t need to answer that. I know you know.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.” Eve’s hand closes around the tape recorder. “Where is this wine bar?”