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Eve sucks in as much air as she possibly can, and screams with all the volume she can muster. "HELP! HELP! HELP!" she gasps again and again, repeating herself endlessly as she treads water, fighting the current, straining up at the boat above her.
Finally, a smoking waiter's head pops over the edge of the railing, and he stares down, dazed, cigarette in hand, searching in the black and blue of the river for the source of the voice.
"HELP ME!" Eve screams, and the young man's mouth drops open as he finally spots her, shakes his head in disbelief and runs, scrambling to detach an orange and white striped life ring from the wall, calling out loudly behind him.
A few more waiters appear, followed by some wedding guests, and the life ring is thrown down to Eve. She clambers into it, sobbing and wailing, and the people on the deck work together to pull her back up and on to the boat.
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Villanelle floats alone, eyes closed, blood flowing from the bullet wounds in her back, wing-like crimson tendrils extending up above her.
"Hey, idiot." A blinding light shines on her, and she strains to open her eyes against it. "Idiot face. Wake up."
Her eyes adjust, and it's Jesus. Herself, but unmistakably Jesus, floating serenely in his long white robe, arms outstretched, sleeves flowing, palms bleeding the same blood she can feel flowing from her back into the dappled light above. He smiles. "Are you really going to let a couple of slow water bullets end us? You should know better than anyone that bullets are practically useless in the water, you've shot enough people." He reaches out and pulls Villanelle towards him. "Come on, hold on to me."
"But Eve-" Villanelle tries, but she's only human and her words come out garbled, her mouth filling with disgusting water, air bubbles shimmying upwards.
"They're not shooting at her, and if we don't start moving now you're going to die, and I don't think you're ready for the afterlife. It's so boring."
Villanelle pulls at Jesus' arm and climbs on to his back, a passenger, and Jesus, with all the strength Villanelle has ever mustered in her life, swims upwards.
Some minutes later, she pulls herself on to the dirty riverbank just below The Queen's Walk, alone, coughing, sputtering, bleeding. The dank brown gravelly rock is harsh, but it's warmer out of the water, and she collapses, reaching out for Jesus but finding no one. Of course he was always in her head, she's not that delusional. But the vision gave her the strength she needed to get herself to shore, and she's grateful. "What now?" she asks no one, grateful for the cover of night, no street lights nearby.
"Villanelle - Villanelle!" A familiar voice hisses quietly from nearby, but she's beginning to fade into unconsciousness, exhausted and bleeding, eyes closing, and she can't make out the figure approaching. "Villanelle!"
One hand on her shoulder, then another, then a pair of arms under hers, lifting her, dragging her. "This would be a lot easier if you'd get up and walk," says the voice, and Villanelle drags herself up from the depths of the sleep that is beckoning to open her eyes, and her gaze is met with a pair of huge, shining brown eyes, gleaming in the darkness.
"Pam? Why are you here..."
"I couldn't save Konstantin..." She averts her gaze, guilty. "So I came to save you. For him. He loved you so much, and he made me promise I'd help you, if I could. Come on, can you stand up? It doesn't look like they got you in the legs?"
With an inordinate amount of effort and help from Pam, Villanelle heaves herself upwards, hanging on to the younger woman, and they clamber over the mud and rocks with great difficulty, heading for a small set of weatherbeaten stairs leading up to the street.
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Villanelle lays on her front, half naked on the slab at Pam's morgue, casting her eyes around the room with a frown as Pam tends to her wounds.
"This is really - weird," she says, wincing at the end of her sentence as Pam pushes a stitch through her skin.
"Well you can't go to hospital, MI6 think you're at the bottom of the Thames, and anyway-"
"MI6?" Villanelle asks, shocked, trying to push herself up.
"Stay still!" Pam pushes her down firmly.
"You're stronger than you look," Villanelle replies, wincing again as Pam returns to stitching.
"I keep telling people not to underestimate me..." Pam sighs. "Anyway, I was going to say, I know what I'm doing. I was studying to be a doctor, until my parents died and left me and my dickhead brother to run their business. I had to drop out of medical school..."
"Why did MI6 want me dead? How do you know that?" Villanelle demands, suspicious.
"Carolyn asked me if I'd work for her. She wanted me to be the one to shoot you."
"WHAT," Villanelle jerks upwards, immediately groaning in pain and surrendering to Pam's strong hands pushing her back down. "...but Carolyn loves me," she mutters gingerly.
"It was her way back into MI6. She was offering up the destruction of The Twelve on a silver platter. She used you to take them down, then tried to have you killed too, since you were their best assassin. She asked me if I would do it, and I said no."
"Why?" Villanelle asks, her face troubled.
"I've got no problem killing arseholes who deserve it. Actually I enjoy it. But I don't like killing people who don't deserve it, honestly, it doesn't make me feel good. I can't just kill without good reason. I know you've killed a lot of people yourself, but... I know you, a bit, and I don't think you deserve to die. Especially not being betrayed by a self-serving old bint who'd hurt anyone in her path just to get herself some power. I don't want to work with someone like that... and you seem like... well, you seem like you've actually got some good left in you."
"Wow" says Villanelle, eyes wide. Pam can't see, but they're filling with tears. A few moments of silence pass, and Villanelle takes a breath, composing herself. "You're not a very good assassin."
"I don't want to be an assassin. Anyway, I'm finished. You're really lucky. That bullet went right through you, and it looks like it only went through muscle, right through the gap under your collarbone." Pam says, helping Villanelle sit up on the slab. "The other two didn't get very far in for some reason, so those were just flesh wounds. I've stopped the bleeding and patched you up as best I can, but you should try and see proper doctors if you can... if there's someone you know who can help?"
"Water bullets..." Villanelle muses, head swimming, her vision of Jesus hinting at her memory, fading away fast like a dream. Pam looks at her inquisitively, and she realises she didn't finish her sentence. "Water stops bullets going as fast as they're meant to."
"Makes sense." Pam replies, offering an odd half-smile to the woman gazing at her. Weary and aching, Villanelle slides off the slab and places a hand on Pam's shoulder.
"Thanks for patching me up. Can I borrow your phone?"
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Eve sobs uncontrollably, surrounded by waiters and wedding guests, swaddled in a silver foil blanket. The paramedics that boarded the boat shortly after it made its emergency docking haven't been able to get a cohesive word out of her. They pulled a small bullet from her, barely embedded into her breast, and cannot get answers out of her about what happened. The music has stopped, but the disco lights were forgotten, and they're still whirling around aimlessly, decorating this strange tableau on the wooden dance floor, centred around Eve.
She's in shock, and she can't get any words out. She can barely form a thought, just a picture of Villanelle in her mind, dragged away by the current, blood blooming from her back like deathly roses. Villanelle. The reason for it all, the one who made it all make sense in the end, the one who gave it all meaning, made it all feel worth it - is dead. The only person in the entire world who understands her is dead, and she waited too long to give in to her desire, terrified of it. She spent years denying, avoiding, turning her back on the only thing that could ever possibly bring her joy. Life before Villanelle was like sleep. Meeting her was waking up, waking up to the darkness in her own heart, the raw instinct for violence and unashamed freedom that she'd been pushing down as long as she could remember. The feverish attraction to women that she'd been pushing down her entire adult life. Kissing Villanelle was like being born again. It was like discovering fire. How can it be that -
"Natsuko - Natsuko, hey - Natsuko - um - Natsuko?" one of the grooms is gently shaking her by the shoulder, and a bell is ringing somewhere close by, and there's a buzzing at her hip, bringing her back to consciousness. "Natsuko, I think your phone's ringing?"
Eve blinks, and pulls her phone out of her wet pocket with difficulty as it buzzes incessantly. It's a landline number she doesn't recognise.
"Hello?"
"Hi, Eve," Villanelle's voice travels through the speaker into her ear, and promptly reaches down into her heart and squeezes it so tight she loses the ability to breathe. She gasps, sobs catching in her throat again.
"Get it together, okay? I'm fine. Listen, we shouldn't stay on the phone - I'm at Pam's morgue, can you come here? She says you know where it is. You have to be quick."
Three quick tones announce that the phone call is over, and Eve sits stunned, a sob caught in her throat, breath halted, mind running a million miles a second.
"Natsuko? Are you okay? Who was that?"
"I-," Eve doesn't have enough breath for the words, and she has to get it together. She thinks she might be hallucinating, or else dead and dreaming, but she knows she has to get it together. She catches her breath as she looks around the room, all the concerned faces peering at her with a mixture of terror and intrigue. All these nice normal faces, living in their vanilla world, free of bullets, blood, bone. Full of boringness. "I have to go,"
She peels herself up, shrugging off the silver blanket, dodging bodies as her senses return, all trained on one thing: her beloved.
"Ma'am, we have to take you to hospital for observation," says a weaselly looking paramedic, stepping in front of her. She tries to sidestep him and he puts his hand on her arm to try and stop her.
"Fuck off!" she shouts, pushing him aside with newly regained strength and running towards the boat's exit, as all the onlookers' mouths hang open in surprise.
She descends the boardwalk to the quiet harbour, picking up speed as she reaches the cobblestone path, barely noticing the figure standing by the boardwalk, a couple of metres away.
"Eve," a voice stops her in her tracks, and she whirls around to see Carolyn standing nonchalantly with her hands in her pockets, smug and self-satisfied as always.
"I think you ought to come with me, don't you? Time for a fresh start, now Villanelle's out of the way."
"What?" Eve's face contorts with inordinate amounts of anger as she stands paralysed by rage, realising what's happened.
"Oh come now Eve, I've given you what you've been wanting all along. The Twelve eradicated, and Villanelle finally out of your life so you can get on with it. That is why you got her arrested, isn't it?"
Eve stands open-mouthed, shaking, hot rage boiling from the very depths of her soul. Carolyn tuts at her.
"Eve, all our aggressors are dead. You've succeeded spectacularly in helping me orchestrate this, I must say. I'm sure you understand why it had to be without you knowing, but honestly, I never thought you'd make it out of this. I'm impressed. Well, anyway - it's all over now, and you can start life anew with your boyfriend - Yusuf, was it? And they're very impressed with you at MI6, you know, past indiscretions aside. They can actually make use of you now. So come along-"
A hoarse, guttural scream rushes out of Eve's throat as she hurls herself at Carolyn with every last speck of force she has left in her body. In a matter of seconds, Carolyn is flung into the side of the boat, her head smacking into a cleat and bursting open, blood already escaping in great quantities as she falls into the gap between the boat and the wall of the dock.
Breathing hard and fast, Eve slowly peers over the edge of the dock. Carolyn is floating face down, great clouds of blood pooling around her head.
"Bitch," she spits. Then she turns on her heel and runs.
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Villanelle is sitting in the waiting room of Pam's morgue, nursing a cup of sugary tea in her left hand, her right arm in a makeshift sling. Pam sits across from her, awkwardly shifting in her seat. The building has been boarded up and empty since she killed her brother and Helene helped to make it all disappear, and a layer of dust has settled on everything.
Then, a banging at the door, Eve's shining eyes peering through the slats of the boards.
Pam gets up to let her in, and Eve barrels past her like a tornado, headed straight for Villanelle, who barely has time to stand before Eve's hands are pulling her head into a feverish kiss, travelling down to her waist to pull her into a tight embrace.
"Ow, you're hurting me!" Villanelle grumbles into Eve's mouth.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Eve pulls away. "I thought... I saw you sinking, I-"
"It doesn't matter. I'm okay. I made it out. Pam was waiting for me - she knew what was happening. She saved me." Villanelle turns to look at Pam, nodding gently in appreciation. Pam nods back awkwardly, suddenly a third wheel.
"Um, I'm going to go make another cup of tea - if you'd like one?" Pam offers, gesturing towards Eve.
"Yes - uh - yes please." Eve replies, smiling at Pam with the warmth of a thousand suns, because Pam rescued her beloved. She turns back to Villanelle, her heart full, and Pam makes her way for the door.
"And biscuits!" Eve calls after her. "If you have any!"
"Biscuits," Villanelle snickers, and Pam slips out of the room.
"I don't understand how you're alive," Eve shakes her head, her brow furrowed.
"The bullet didn't hit anything important. Only muscles. It went right through me."
"I know. It got me too - just barely." Eve brings her hand up to the small square bandage the paramedics placed on the shallow wound to her breast. "But I thought I saw you shot in the water?"
"Bullets lose their speed in the water, dummy, that's why we jumped! They hit me, but just barely."
"I am not a dummy," Eve points a playful finger at Villanelle, a head cracking grin teasing at her lips as the sheer euphoria of Villanelle's very aliveness begins to wash over her.
"You are a bit." Villanelle smiles back, wrapping her free hand around Eve's pointed finger like a baby, and pulling it down before pushing her fingers through Eve's. "But listen, Eve. Obviously, it's not safe for me to stay here. I have to get out of the country. I know someone here who can get me a fake identity, passport, disguise, and get me on a plane out of here. I've already called her and she's on her way here. But I have to go now, because she was employed by The Twelve and she needs to disappear too. Eve, listen to me. I want you to promise me two things,"
"Villanelle, I-"
"Just listen to me, two things, Eve." Villanelle interrupts her, placing her hand on Eve's cheek. "One, promise me you'll kill that bitch Carolyn for me, it was her who had me shot-"
"I know, I-"
"And two, promise me you won't tell anyone I'm alive. Promise me, Eve. I don't know what a promise means between us now, but promise me anyway. Promise me you won't give me up,"
Villanelle lets her hand fall away from Eve's cheek, staring, because Eve has suddenly fallen silent after trying to interrupt repeatedly.
"Give you up?" Eve's eyes fill with fat, salty tears and they begin to roll down her cheeks. " Villanelle, I-" her breath catches in her throat. "I want to go with you."
Villanelle's eyes widen, and gloss over with tears. So dog-tired and accepting of her endless solitude, betrayed again and again, she hadn't even deigned to consider the possibility that Eve would want to stick by her side. She pulls Eve into a tender kiss, her heart flooding with warmth. More than warmth; the relief, and release, of getting all she's yearned for for as long as she can remember. The companionship of someone who understands her. Maybe even...
"Why?" she ventures the question, their faces close, breath hot and heady, hearts in throats. Maybe she knows the answer already, but she needs to hear it.
"Because... because I love you," Eve says gently, and tears are rolling down both their cheeks now, and they lean closer still, foreheads touching as they surrender to their emotions.
"I love you," Villanelle replies, her voice barely working through the lump knotted in her throat. They kiss again, tasting each other's tears.
"I know," Eve says, smirking as she pulls away a little. Villanelle swats at her, feigning annoyance.
"OK, well let's not start acting like that disgusting couple we met or we'll have to commit suicide."
"Oh my god they were awful," Eve chuckles, and Villanelle laughs too, her eyes wide with the horror at the thought of the wimpy heterosexuals. A few small moments of silence fall, and Eve takes a breath. "Um... I have to tell you. I think I already killed Carolyn - well - I think. She thought I wanted you dead, and she came to find me to try and recruit me again. I shoved her over the edge of the dock, she cracked her head open on the boat and fell into the river."
Villanelle's mouth hangs open in surprise, and then she grins, and laughs, loud and whooping, gently smacking Eve on the arm.
"I should have killed her myself when I had the chance. You know Helene paid me 150,000 euros to do it? But I'm glad it was you, at least."
"Well, she might not be dead, and I don't think we should stick around to find out."
"You're right. My contact - Moksha - she'll be here any minute. Eve, we can go anywhere we want." Villanelle's tired face is lighting up with possibility. "But where do you want to go?"
Eve smiles, touching her hand to Villanelle's heart.
"How about Alaska?"
- THE END -