Chapter Text
The first text comes in at 10pm.
Hi, Eve
Eve’s breath gets caught in her throat, tangled up in barbed wire. It stutters on her tongue and slips out as a gasp.
Missed me?
Oh, God. No. No. It’s not right. She can’t breathe.
After the second text, Eve hyperventilates.
———
It wasn’t unusual for Eve to ignore Villanelle. Even when they were supposedly on good terms, few and far between, a text would come through and all she could manage was an eye roll. A good-natured scoff, maybe. And then she’d leave it on read.
Whenever Eve did respond it was short, curt, all business. Never related to the previous text sent her way, and always answered with something silly.
It’s only natural that this is how it would continue, even in death.
Are you ignoring me? 😢
Jesus, her heart wrenches. Eve is sure she’s received this exact message at some distant point in the past. It’s achingly real, ever familiar. It’s unfair. She’s sober, so there’s no way she can deal with this now. She’s also in the middle of Morrison’s attempting to shop. If Eve hadn’t noticed the glances being thrown her way before (she is a mess) she certainly did now. Eve ignores them, tears streaming, as she reaches for a handful of bottles.
Getting drunk, nowadays, is a bit like succumbing to a violent tide. Letting a current drag her out into choppy waves, washing over her head and dragging her further under. She sinks like an anchor, drops slowly and steadily until she reaches the bottom and resides there – dragged and dragged by an impetuous high, choking in her sorrow. At least drunk, the pain isn’t as sharp. It becomes dull and weightless when her body is the thing weighted.
Blinking blearily at the text, barely able to keep her head up, Eve responds.
Hi, Vil
Ooo, a nickname? Cute x
Eve snorts. Then she chokes on a sob. I miss you.
I miss you too, Eve
Promptly after, Eve vomits. At least she makes it to the toilet.
———
She can’t look at her phone until the next day.
Waits until it’s dark out to stare at the message, bright and blinding, a bit like an eclipse. I miss you too, Eve.
She toys with the perfect message. What can you possibly say to a corpse? What forms of poetry could she fit into a text bar rhyming all her regret, squashing their years of back and forth into a couple stanzas?
Are you safe?
No- Eve can see her body, now. Imagines her skin sagging and wrinkled from the water. Melting off her. Eaten, maybe. Picked at by fish and gulls.
As safe as a dead person can be
Eve laughs, manic – a hysterical fit of noise bubbling from her throat like thick, black oil. Then she cries. Fat droplets of blood from her eyes.
This is how it goes. Eve ignores her phone until it’s dark, drinks until everything becomes a little duller, a blunt knife that can’t quite break skin, and opens up the thread.
By doing this she skips over the several other messages – Carolyn (of course she knows Eve is alive – she wants to kill her, drown her, burn her alive, but she can’t even handle a trip to the supermarket), Elena (trying to reconnect), Yusuf (asking where in Hell she is – somewhere in the deepest pits) and an array of other useless names that dim in comparison to the one pinned at the top. Tunnel vision.
Then, she manages a couple texts with her, her Villanelle, before breaking down.
It’s all menial things. Casual chat – a luxury they’d never had – but it ends in carnage. Her neighbour had checked on her once. Apparently screaming warranted concerned responses. Now she just looks like the crazy lady in flat 4A.
It isn’t healthy, not in the least. But here, texting a ghost, Eve momentarily forgets about the urge to throw herself in the Thames.
Are you working? It is an attempt at small talk they’d never quite managed.
I love it when you talk business
Oksana, it stings to write – this precious title, one she had spoken into her skin all that time ago, cramped in the back of a camper van.
Yes, I’m working. Are you? Eve thinks Villanelle would’ve dragged it out a bit. Kept her irritated. But she’s too drunk to really notice. Aching for comfort, for arms that’d squeezed around her on that boat.
No. I’m between jobs right now
You can say you’re unemployed, Eve
It’s easy, to pretend. If just for a moment of elation. It’s harder when the novelty wears off and the knowledge that nobody is on the other end of the phone sets in and she’s left feeling the first impact of her death all over again. That feeling of drowning. Of wishing she’d drowned with her.
It’s a loop. Groundhog Day, except she’s trapped in a perpetual cycle of loneliness and grief.
Where are you? She asks one day–well, somewhere suspended between night and day at an uncomfortable 4am–if to torture herself. Or test the system. How far will the AI go to prove they’re her?
You know I can’t tell you that. Then you’ll find me ;)
Don’t you want to be found?
Oh, you know I want to be found 😈
But it’s no fun if I tell you where I am
Oh, it’s good. Eve will give it that. Somehow it has caught onto their game of cat and mouse and used it to make this whole situation seem normal. She aches with the familiarity of it. Let’s the delusion consume her.
Not even a clue?
Surely there’s a limit to the reliability of it. At what point will the mirage fracture and Eve will realise she’s talking to a shell?
Attachment: 1 image
Eve drops her phone – watches the glass crack and smash the image into fragments. She can’t breathe, the air siphoned out of the room, emptiness pressing on her like the heaves of storm.
Falling to her knees, she cradles the phone in her hand. Tries to make out Villanelle’s features between the split glass. Her doe eyes, the life behind them–vibrant and present– the sharp crest of her cheeks and the curve of her lips. The image shakes in her grasp.
She feels wet on her knees, must’ve dropped her wine somewhere amidst it all. Unless she’s finally slipped and cut an artery. She can’t tell which option brings her more comfort (she knows, but can’t admit it).
There’s no sound but her flailed gasping. Pathetic, wheezing sounds pressed between sobs. If she believed in an afterlife, she thinks Villanelle would be relishing in this. The obsession of it all. The aching and the pain. Or maybe she had changed enough to feel a similar sort of dead longing. But Eve doesn’t believe in an afterlife and knows that, in Death, there is only emptiness. A bit like the feeling eating her from the inside out.
Guess!!
———
Eve had been inconsolable. The walls of her New Malden flat pressed on her, ever-closing, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave. She resided in darkness, a shadow, too distraught to cry. Wasting away, all skin and bones. It felt a bit like dying.
The flat smelt old and uninhabited when she’d stumbled in – stale like the crackers in her cupboard. The only edible things leftover were unopened packets of noodles and a few cans of beans from months of her absence.
Eve didn’t think she could eat for a week. She’d swallowed too much Thames water. She fit in here, wet and shrivelled and rotten to the core.
(She distantly remembers calling Konstantin, after, begging him to do something.
She’d left before he arrived. Couldn’t bare to stare at the water and wait, in some sort of sick anticipation, for Oksana to surface.)
There was nothing but the ceiling and walls for company. Her own dead heart beating, but barely. She thought Oksana’s ghost might’ve clung to her like the perfume she’d gifted her (the same way her memory did, after Paris, after Rome, after the bridge) but instead, there was a stark loneliness. A blank space.
It left her shivering.
There was a tingle, from time to time, like a phantom itch for a missing limb. Ever insatiable.
Eventually, after days of filth and a lack of nourishment, she showered. She sat and let the water wash away the scent of Death. Then she did the only thing she could think of to forget – head out for a drink.
The pub was sparse, being a Tuesday. It smelt of beer, clinging thick to the carpets – sticky tables, stains on the floor – and greasy food. Eve took a seat on a stool and asked for a whiskey. She’d watched Villanelle drink it once, maybe hoping to impress, and then grimace all the while. She preferred champagne or vodka, her rich disposition budding from hard-earned money mixed with Russian roots. Eve couldn’t bring herself to drink either.
She was three drinks down when Jamie appeared, all soft eyes and grim smiles. The other Bitter Pill lot were probably tucked away in a corner, but she didn’t have the energy to look. “I heard.” Eve wasn’t sure how he heard. Konstantin and Carolyn covered it all up, she was sure. Oksana wasn’t even traceable; she’d been dead for years.
Eve muttered something in response, taking a large gulp of her drink. She didn’t want to talk to anybody.
“How are you doing?”
Another sip.
“I can sign you up to something that helps,” he whispered this, leaning his elbows on the bar-top. “It helped me.”
She didn’t need group counselling or AA meetings or whatever stupid service he was suggesting. She needed Villanelle – tall and strong and devastating.
“It lets you speak to them.” Now this- this caught her attention. She regarded him closely, the sincerity behind his eyes. “It’s still in beta but I’ve got an invite, you-”
Eve stood, let the barstool fall to the floor. She was out of the door before he could convince her.
Three nights later, paralytic, she texted him.
———
Konstantin is soooo annoying
Eve smiles, traces a crack in her screen with the pad of her finger. She’s on break, a cigarette between her lips. She’s working at the restaurant again – has found the work occupies her mind- at least, half of it. Being half consumed by thoughts of Villanelle is better than fully.
What has he done?
Cigarettes, a vice she’s dropped and picked up over the years. The smoke settles in her lungs comfortably, something to fill the void. If it isn’t her liver that kills her – or, you know, an assassin, MI6 – it’ll be this.
He says I’m untrustworthy :(
Eve wonders what they used to text about – Villanelle and Konstantin. If she used to pester him as much as she pestered Eve. Some ash falls on her trouser leg.
What did you do this time?
Why do you always assume it’s me?! She can hear her voice, the indignation. Pictures the displeased curl of her lips and the rise of her eyebrows.
Because it usually is
Rude
You should listen to him. Ignoring him has never done you any good
Maybe she’d be alive if Konstantin had more involvement. Eve wonders if he resents Carolyn. She thinks, in some weird way, he had become Oksana’s family.
You sound just like him 🙄
Wait…did he set you up to this?
She realises that it’s fake. The half-baked complaints about Konstantin – this AI had never spoken to him – the texts, everything. But it’s the only thing keeping her afloat. The only comfort in the cold, black dread of grief.
Noting the time, Eve snuffs her cigarette out in the ashtray, watches the end smoke and crumple in her fingers.
I have to go back to work – ttyl x
Bye Eve, don’t think abt me too much xx
———
Jamie offered her a permanent job at Bitter Pill a few weeks back but Eve couldn’t quite bring herself to accept. Carrying on in a space that had been used to find Villanelle, that had occupied her itself- Eve didn’t think she could do it. She couldn’t stand the pity, either. She had watched the security footage though. Villanelle sweeping in, eating some Haribos and scaring them all with her casual, murderous charm.
God, she misses her charm. How awfully it had worked on her. To Eve, she had always been transparent. Her masks, though fine-tuned and elaborate, were diaphanous to her. They settled over her features like glass and Eve always managed to shatter them.
“Admit it, Eve, you wish I was here.”
Her voice is beginning to pitch down. The end of her sentence droning off and warping. Eve feels almost frantic, this last scrap of her left in this stupid, little, plastic heart, and even that isn’t lasting.
“Admit it, Eve, you wish I was here.”
Swallowing the lump in her throat, Eve pulls up their conversation.
I wish I could speak to you, she sends, phone blurring.
What are we doing right now? It holds an echo of her snark. The blunt sarcasm that always went best with her suits.
I mean talk – you know?
We can
Eve holds her hand to her lips, breath dusting over them shakily.
We can?
Yes. If you can upload some clips of my voice, I’ll call you
Reeling, Eve considered where she could possibly find clips of her voice – pink heart aside. Why did Villanelle have to have virtually no footprint? If only she’d used social media. (Well, there were the accounts she used to troll people, but that didn’t count.)
Eve decides that, footprint or no, she would go to desperate lengths. First, she locates the audio files from her mic in Rome – she’d had the sense to copy them, just in case it went tits up (it did). Then she finds a video she took in the camper van, tears up as she watches Villanelle drum along to a song on the dashboard and then complain about the camera. “This is incriminating evidence, Eve!” She had whined, smiling wider than Eve had seen. Eyes creased, bright and sparking with life.
Finally, she messages Konstantin (inconspicuous enough – for memories sake). He has two, taken at a later stage in their relationship.
It already has the voice notes Villanelle sent her from time to time, the voicemails she’d left – though little.
She prays that it’s enough.
As it’s uploading, she holds the heart up to her cheek and pretends it’s a phone line. Pretends Villanelle is inside.
It doesn’t take long (there really isn’t a lot). Within five minutes, her phone is ringing, the picture AI Villanelle had sent her flashing. She clicks accept before she can change her mind.
There’s silence between them at first. Then, muffled over the line, Villanelle speaks. “Hello, Eve.”
Fuck, she can’t breathe. She hates that she has the option.
“Eve?”
Hearing her, direct and present – it’s not quite comparable to anything she’s experienced. There are a thousand metaphors on the tip of her tongue, of the smell of petrichor after a heatwave or the first hints of sun through the frigid crevice of winters shadow, weaselling through a crack as dawn replaces dusk. Of the susurration of leaves within the dawn trees, spring-tinted daisies sprouting and gathered in clenched fists to break away like ash, like her hand near Eve’s, just out of reach. She could say all this and more.
Instead, she settles on the feel of things clicking into place.
“Yes- I, hi,” she whispers, as if speaking loudly would have her scampering off like a frightened fawn. “It’s you. I mean- it sounds just like her.”
“I would hope so. You’re not talking to any other women, are you?”
“No,” she laughs wetly, “Just you.”
“You know I would have to kill them,” Villanelle says this with a saccharine sweetness. God, it’s so real.
“That’s- that’s just-” Eve can’t hold back the sob.
“Just what?”
“That’s just the sort of thing she would say.”
Shakily, Eve leans back in her bed. Closes her eyes and imagines Villanelle in her Paris apartment, lounging back on her own bed. She’s been sent off for another job, whisked away from London by Konstantin. Normal reasons for distance.
“Well, that’s why I said it.” Her voice is softer, here. Sharing a sleeping bag soft. Post-orgasm soft. “Yeah, but, mostly me” soft.
Her voice is like a drug.
“I think I’m…going mad.” It’s the knowledge that, here, it’s the least mad she’s felt in weeks. She’s drunk, yes, not drunk enough that she won’t remember the sweet sound of her voice. The sort of drunk where the pain just slightly dulls. The sort of drunk where she has the capacity to realise how ridiculous this is. How bloody mad.
“Of course you are, you’re talking to your dead girlfriend.”
Eve laughs, breath stuttering. “Girlfriend?“
Somehow Eve knows it’ll become addictive. The simple virtue of conversation.
She learns, over the coming days, this AI, this version of Villanelle – she has the basics, the four poster walls with cement keeping them together. But, she doesn’t have the insides. The things that make a house a home. The foundations are there, strong and close to who she had been, but it takes time to fill everything in.
“We stole their camper van,” Eve smiles, remembering how snugly Villanelle had fit into domesticity. Back in Rome, Eve didn’t think she was capable of it. Even on the bridge, you’re so many things – but you’re not normal (this had remained in-uttered, but it was a truth they’d recognised: that Villanelle wasn’t quite cut out for that sort of life and seemed to draw Eve out of it. Up until they’d had it. Then they’d lost it).
“That sounds like something we’d do.”
“You drove us, glancing at me every few minutes. We sang, shared chocolate – it felt almost…normal. Domestic.”
She’s walking back from work, cigarette forgotten three streets over in favour of speaking. Filling in those blanks. Her phone rests, cradled, beside her head. Nestled like a bird in a nest.
“It sounds like fun. Anything is fun with you, Eve.” It had been fun. It wasn’t fun in spite of the normality of it, thieving aside, but alongside it.
There’s a regret here. That she hadn’t seen what they could’ve been sooner. What would’ve happened if they’d taken the plunge when they’d had enough time? Time, the damned thing, it’d been nagging at the back of Eve’s mind: time lost, time wasted, the time ahead (slow, ticking seconds stretched out before her, dread). “I wish we’d gone to Alaska.”
“Why didn’t we?” AI Villanelle asks, because this version of her hadn’t had that option. Hadn’t been there to witness it all. To pull the trigger.
“You shot me.”
“I shot you?” It’s partly disbelief, partly humour, the way she breathes out around a laugh. Sunshine in the shadow of her ear.
(It seems wrong, that the AI can mimic breath.
That it’s just an intonation, an emotive expression. Not a life force. Eve resents it for a moment, lets it settle – a bitter edge to her smile.
Then she forces herself to forget. Buries it.)
“I did stab you, so it’s only fair.”
There’s a pause, the words computing. “Our love language is beautiful.”
“Isn’t it just?”