Work Text:
The clock is ticking.
The clock is ticking and Katya is unaware, she doesn’t care. Her golden locks are swinging freely against the winter breeze, a bloody cigarette clutched between the index and middle finger of her left hand, switching places from her mouth to her fingers, from her mouth to her fingers—and then again— from her mouth to her fingers. Her lips are painting it crimson and she can’t tell if it’s the paint or the blood on them, she doesn’t care. Her right hand holds a gun with no bullets: the same gun she used to ensure the death of the person she once called her жизнь–her life– because Sofia was as bittersweet as her life and any life. Sofia was the first fall of snow in Naples and the last snowflake to fall in Moscow, she was the drug and the dealer, she was the Eve and the forbidden apple all at once—and that’s what made her so bitter and so sweet and so intense that she had to be killed to make life livable.
But it was too late,
The clock is ticking.
The clock is ticking and Katya knows and she’s ignoring it, because she doesn’t care. She’s ignoring it as she steps on a puddle in the grey street, she stands above it and views herself; She doesn’t recall the skin-tight dress that reached her knees and the fur coat that stood before her being so colored when she was leaving the house the same morning. The liquid reflection starts to ripple, so fragile that a simple breath is enough to destruct it. Somehow that reminds Katya of Sofia—she is the fragility in her destructed soul and the destruction to her fragility from within. Perhaps that is why she missed—why for the first time her hands were failing her as she struggled to point the gun. She didn’t miss because she didn’t love her, she missed because she did not know what love would be if the boat had sunk with both of them in it, she did not know love with Sofia as she had known it with Goncharov. Goncharov the embodiment of peace and quiet, that was all he wanted— he wanted nothing from her. He was sweet and kind and then not so much when he needed to be. Katya saw herself in him, that’s why he was easy to love, never too harsh, never too much. Sofia was an addiction; brutal in any way someone can be. The amount of adrenaline Katya gained after seeing her each time— after making sure the coast was clear, after borrowing time and making the most out of it, after leaving no trace behind, as if they never existed in the same room at the first place— it was too much for her to stop. Sofia was wild and crazy and infuriating, in a way she would intoxicate you into loving her more than you thought you could offer to her person. Katya gave her all into loving her because she was nothing like her— opposites attract.
The clock had stopped ticking.
It was too late at night to be accompanying her mind with nostalgia—if anything, it made the guilt in her system even more lively than before, like it was ready to jump out of her heart and choke her with its very own bare hands. That was, if she didn’t do it herself first. The reason the gun had no bullets was because she had taken the rest after firing two—if she had not she would have killed herself. “Mоя жизнь,” she repeated, “моя, моя, моя жизнь.” In a jazz rhythm that wasn’t playing at the time but was familiar in her mind. The road to Goncharov’s wasn’t long. The clacking sound of her pearly white shoes against the cement paused as she took her last step.
“Your time is up, Katya.”
She only smiled. She didn’t answer, she didn’t care.