Chapter Text
Villanelle stands in a broken city.
The fires she had set aren’t fires anymore — not really. They had started in buildings, but the buildings had turned to ruins, and the ruins had turned to ashes, and the ashes had turned to nothing.
In the nothing, there is a job, and it is a job well done.
She was created to protect time, and in every instance of careful conservation (the one thing she had been born with: the kind of knowledge of a skill that should only have been possible with years of practice), she has succeeded.
She is the best agent there is—or, at least, that is what the Twelve likes to believe.
Villanelle knows better.
She was not, unlike the organisation as a whole, born with in-built pride — she is prideful, when she needs to be, but she does not let it blind herself, as it does too-wise men.
She is the very best they have, but there are far more agents whose loyalties lie elsewhere.
This is what she thinks of as the letter takes its shape.
It is a speck of ash, burning in the air — that is, until it isn’t. As it falls, it expands: grows until it is what it used to be (she is supposed to be the only one who can manipulate time with such delicacy, such easy finesse).
She outstretches her hand, and it bunches in her palm as if it had been the last stage in its regeneration, all along — as if it had started, as it had ended, as something of her own.
The paper could have been poisoned. A trap. A bad decision. These, as a soldier, are the things she is supposed to consider, but she unfolds the letter with a kind of delicacy she has never reserved for anything but time before.
With the same delicacy, she begins to read.
Dear Stranger,
Do I dare call you that? We have met several times before, even if you were not aware of the times in which I was watching, and you were not (this I doubt: you seem aware in all the ways people often forget to be). It feels a disservice to the both of us to act as if we have not been mere inches from turning the other in—but, in the eyes of many, the true disservice would lie in our failures to do so.
Perhaps I am feeling too remarkable in my prowess. Perhaps I sense that you are, also. Does it truly have to matter? I was not born with the capability of being bored, but I am perfectly capable of curiosity, and you are a curious thing.
If I were bored, I suppose I would be asking you to entertain me.
I think of strange things while writing this letter — bitter winter. Medieval France. Blonde hair, in tight braids (that was how you wore it when I saw you last: do you remember? I have often wondered if you are capable of such a human notion).
The absence of loneliness, in a very lonely life.
It is as if you have imbued me with all the things that make you you, even if I have no ways of understanding these ciphers of yours. Tell me: are you lonely? It is the impression I have of you— your work, which I feel I must show my sincere respect for (you are both brutally delicate and delicately brutal), screams of it. Though there are many things which set us apart, skills not included, this is one thing I feel we share.
By the time you write me back, I have every intention of having learnt how to decipher you. It is with my own foolishness only that I hope, by then, you will let me.
Yours faithfully,
Eve.
It feels wrong— the easy freedom of an enemy's name. It goes against the lessons they were both taught at the beginning of an endless existence: in the easiness of the name, there is a difficulty that lurks under the surface. A danger.
Underneath the ink and the paper and the time and the fire, it lurks — but she does not think of this at all. Instead, she traces her nail, with a kind of archeological fascination, along the cursive: takes in every minute detail, every fine, near-invisible perfection and mistake.
By the time she throws it in what is left of the fire, she has already committed it to memory.
She takes the pen from a little ghost of a town in Southern Maine, and the paper from a dying colony who wait, in precious denial, to catch starships already at full capacity. She feels a little stab of guilt when she takes it, but then again — it is not as if they are going to miss such a small thing.
A small thing for them, perhaps. An impossibly large one for her.
Villanelle takes little pieces of the places she is assigned to, scattered across time and earth and memory, and makes something whole with them — or, perhaps, the pieces are of herself.
Either way, she is all too eager to share them.