Chapter Text
It takes less time to get back to the thick of the city than Villanelle would’ve thought. Walking with Eve through the tunnels had seemed heady and languorous at once -- one long adrenaline rush that threw the gravity off, so they went against the grain instead of with it. But of course it would be like this now, after everything. It’s always faster moving away from something than towards it.
She takes a deep, even breath. When she was small, a teacher had told her she should try and count up to ten and back down again, slowly, if something ever made her angry. It would calm her down, he promised. But that teacher was stupid, and the next time Andrei had taken her pencil, she’d taken it back, and pressed it into his thigh so hard he bled and cried. And that had calmed her down.
But this isn’t school, and there’s no Andrei, no pencils or annoying teachers; this is bigger and wider than that, this is Eve, Eve , and deep breaths will do less than nothing -- Villanelle is --
She turns exactly so her back is to the ruins, and they’re not even in her periphery. It’s over, it’s done, and she doesn’t care. She can feel how much she doesn’t care pressing against her ribs, but soon it will be quieter.
Villanelle is very, very good at making things quiet.
She rounds another corner and this street is one she recognises, yes, she knows where she is. There’s a small crowd by the storefronts, mostly Americans in lanyards waving iPhones. A woman flags Villanelle down -- young, blonde, straight-haired, no curls, not like --
“Could you take a picture of me and my boyfriend?” she asks, and Villanelle waits for the usual dizzy rush, the one that comes from being so, so underestimated, from playing bit parts in the lives of other people who will never really know they almost died, almost got broken down to their pieces just to give her something to do.
Villanelle considers: OMG, totally, babe! He’s so fit, you’re a lucky girl! , and then maybe dropping the phone, grinding her heel into it for good measure. But valleygirl-on-holiday doesn’t go with her outfit, regal and refined and wine-coloured, so instead she says, “I’m sorry, I’m late to a lunch. I’m sure someone else around here could help you.” Then she pulls a tight smile, and continues on her way.
She could’ve wrecked their day, and with so little effort. Villanelle likes tourists, though. They’re bright and gaudy, and she can trace the grating of their accents and bubblegum-snaps in the thin expressions of the locals.
Villanelle has never really been a tourist anywhere. It’s something she’s good at, exceptional at: shrugging into a borrowed normality, blending into a place she’s never been to as if it was where she learned to ride a bike and had her first kiss and all the et cetera of growing up ordinary that she’s patched together from a blur of Netflix. But Villanelle thinks she would quite like to go somewhere, for once, and not fit. To be brash and loud and unapologetically of the elsewhere. Perhaps in Alaska, she and Eve might’ve --
There is a gelato place somewhere around here that Konstantin dearly loves, and she is going to go and order his very favourite in horrifying quantities now that he is not here to enjoy it.
Spite often tastes like strawberry-mango twist, in Villanelle’s experience.
It’s another few winding blocks, a sagging mix of modern and ancient slapped together, neon signs on buildings older than some languages. Villanelle has only been to Rome a handful of times, and she won’t come back. Because of the buildings, obviously. They’re tacky. They should stop trying to lacquer over something broken, should just let it all fall apart, and then maybe, maybe, the ruins would know they were ruins, and they wouldn’t believe they could be new again, or that they could fit somewhere that didn’t really want them to be what they were, and --
Anyway. She prefers Paris.
The gelato parlour is out of the way, hidden in a tiny alley that wouldn’t seem like it led anywhere unless you already knew it did. And she does know, because Konstantin brought her here when they were friends , when she was twenty-two and he told her chocolate is an ice-cream flavour, not a gelato flavour, so even though she’d wanted peach she’d asked for ganache just to watch his eye twitch.
She pushes the door open with far more force than necessarily, but not enough to shatter the window. The clerk winces even so, and there’s the immediate temptation to send her fist through the glass, to give him something to really wince about.
She walks right up to the counter, and the man already waiting shifts out of her way on instinct. At the last second, he tries to pretend it’s a kindness, gesturing a no, you, of course , as if it were manners and not intuitive fear that made him move.
The clerk clears his throat. “What can I get you?” he asks in lilting English, and she takes a beat to be offended that he’s assumed she can’t speak Italian.
“Come? Cos’ha detto?” she asks, pairing it with her most innocent expression, and he scrabbles to switch languages again.
She stares down at the display case, at the brightness of the swirling creams against the marble-finish tubs.
The clerk clears his throat. “Ti consiglio di --”
“Le fragole e mango, per favore,” she drawls sweetly, batting her eyelashes a little, and there it goes, the blush in his cheeks, and why does Eve have to be so complicated when other people are so easy --
He grins. “Certo.”
Behind him, the wall is covered in stickers, so many layers that they form a seamless mass, shiny and intricate. They’re mostly franchise logos and band labels but there’s one that’s a tattered rainbow, several years old and nearly bleached entirely away, and underneath it says, Love Wins!
Villanelle takes a second to imagine it: Love, a greased-up fighter on one of those god-awful cable shows, swinging calloused fists, spitting and shoving sweat out of its eyes.
She scoffs. Useless. One nick to the femoral artery and Love would go down, bleed out, and Villanelle would win. Maybe she should get that on a sticker.
“Signorina?”
Villanelle Wins! , pasted on the walls of a new apartment, in a new country. And she is winning, she’s always winning, because she has the best of everything. The nicest clothes and the sharpest knives and the most beautiful face. So what if she doesn’t have Eve? Eve might’ve turned away from her, but Eve is also lying in agony in the dirt right now. Villanelle is clearly still the victor in that equation.
“Signorina? Questo gelato costa dieci euros.”
Why is she getting gelato? She should be having champagne. The most expensive champagne in Rome. She should flatter some trust-fund boy into buying it for her, and then she should drink it in the largest hotel suite that she can get on short notice, and that will prove exactly how much she is glad of all this, to have come out on top.
“Scusa --”
Villanelle turns and leaves the shop, each step faster than the one before. Because why bother gloating to an obnoxious rich college senior she’ll probably kill anyway, what’s the point of bragging if she can’t do it by teasing Eve and prodding and prying until Eve snaps back? Until Eve tries to beat her in turn, and fails or succeeds -- either or, it doesn’t matter, because it’s the Eve of it all that makes it winning.
She was right. About time going faster. It feels like it only takes a minute to get to the ruins again, to retrace her path until she’s standing by a towering column, at the edge of a stain of coppered blood mixed with sandstone dust.
Until she’s rigid and blank, inches from the empty space where Eve should be.