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“I thought I’d lost you there, for a second.” It’s another one of her non-committal sentences. She says it plainly. Like a fact, almost. States it like she’s citing something. For a thesis. Or an essay. There is nothing to indicate how she feels about it. Nothing.
Villanelle—still walking ahead—huffs. Loudly. Eve thinks she can see her roll her eyes, even with her back turned towards her. When the blonde finally halts and faces her, she stops the vehicle, too. Villanelle looks like she is about to take a step towards her—a threat, perhaps?—but decides against it at the last second, shifting her weight back to her original foot. “And what about it? Hm?”
Eve remains silent. This time, she sees the eye roll. She makes a noise that somewhat resembles “I—” but most of it gets choked back when she realizes she’s got nowhere to go with the sentence, whatever it would have been.
“You come after me. You’re out here. Yet you’ve got nothing to say.” Villanelle scoffs. “Just go, Eve. I won’t tell you again.” She starts walking again, facing away from the older woman. Calls out, “You’ve already ignored me twice. You’re not being very considerate.”
Eve doesn’t listen. Again. Simply follows, drives after her, stops the scooter once again when she’s only about a meter away. Almost having completely caught up with Villanelle, she reaches out—but doesn’t quite have the energy to touch her arm. She retracts the limb.
“You got me arrested!” the blonde finally yells, and her voice is dripping with—pain? Exasperation? Exhaustion? She steps closer, threateningly so, and looks at Eve. It’s intense, so intense, and Eve wants to avert her gaze, wants to look down at the pavement, but she can’t, somehow. She swallows, instead. “You have me arrested, have them throw me into a fucking prison cell, and then you have the nerve to show back up as if nothing happened. And then, to clear your conscience, you jump at the opportunity to save me.” She laughs. It’s bitter. Laced with venom.
The venom is aimed entirely at the woman next to her. And it hits its target. Hard. Eve shivers as a wave of guilt hits her. Is that what she was—is—doing? Making herself feel better after betraying Villanelle? Is she taking care of her to make up for everything she’s done? Is she dressing her, washing her, combing her hair, helping her to keep this guilt she knows she would otherwise experience at bay?
“What on Earth would I do without you?” comes the sarcastic, completely rhetorical question to take Eve out of her thoughts. “Oh, I know! I wouldn’t be feeling like shit all the time.”
That one stings even more. Fuck. “Villanelle, I—” Eve shakes her head. Words have escaped her, it seems. No vocabulary is to be found. She knows Villanelle is right. She did get her arrested. For her own sake. Because she wanted to escape her own emotions. Turn them off. It wasn’t for the public’s safety. So Villanelle would stop killing. No. It had been a decision, an act of selfishness. And, as it turns out, it may have been the stupidest thing she’s ever done, because Villanelle looks and sounds and talks like she’s not going to be ready to forgive her for a while. This, whatever she is trying to do, won’t just… mend things, either. SHe feels her head fall. How—why—does she keep getting herself into these situations?
Villanelle takes a deep, trembling breath. “Eve, I’m serious. Get the fuck away from me. Leave. I don’t want to see you again. You—”
“I love you.” It’s far from perfect. It’s not even what she was planning on saying. But it seems to be the only string of words she can put together, and it’s the truth, and—it’s out now. Eve presses her lips together. Her eyes close involuntarily. She takes a shaky breath. She’s got no idea what the fuck she’s doing. Her mouth opens to continue, to explain herself in some way, but—nothing comes out. I love you truly was the only coherent sentence her last remaining brain cells were able to conjure up.
“What?”
It sounds so—she’s not even sure. She can’t bear it, looking at her. Her eyes are still shut. Can’t bear the judgment, the—whatever it is that is currently on her face.
There’s a pause before— “Eve, please. Just—spare me more bullshit. Spare me everything and just go,” Villanelle bites out. “You’ve really done enough.”
Eve takes the very tiny chunk of courage that is left within her body, her brain, and gets up. Her eyes open, and she walks around the vehicle to step up to Villanelle. Looks at her. Actually looks at her. There are a lot of emotions in Villanelle’s eyes. On her face. None of which she can decipher right now. “I do. I love you,” Eve repeats. “I had you arrested because I couldn’t deal with my feelings for you. So I tried to make you…” She sighs. Whatever she is going to say, it’s going to sound shitty. So she may as well just be open. “I just tried to make you go away. Just like you’ve made people go away.”
Villanelle scoffs. “Oh, fuck you.”
It hits her, hurts her, but she deserves it. She pulls through. “I knew that, no matter what, you’d eventually take on another job. And you’d try and get my attention again. And I needed you to—I needed you to not do that. I needed you gone.” She takes a deep breath, brings a hand up to wipe her forehead. “Believe me, I know it’s dumb. The dumbest thing I’ve ever done, probably. Because—” She swallows. Takes another breath. Shakes her head. Continues, “Because at the end of the day, this, right here? This will always be us.” She daringly takes a step towards Villanelle.
The woman’s lip quivers slightly. In rage? Fury? Disappointment? Sadness? Disgust? Who knows.
“You will always be seeking my attention. And I will always be giving you just that. You’ll always want me to find you. I always will. And I’ll always be patiently waiting for you wherever I am, knowing you’ll catch up. It’s just us. We’re connected, and we always will be. And I know now that neither injuring one of us nor driving one of us away nor arresting one of us is going to do anything.” And people have tried. Hell, they’ve even tried themselves. Stabbing one another. Shooting one another. Nothing has worked. Nothing has torn them apart. They haven’t stopped their little game. They’ve been them for years now. “I don’t exactly know where we’ll go from here,” she admits, quietly. “But then again, does either of us ever? Really?”
Villanelle looks down, at their feet. Blinks. Seems to be contemplating what Eve has said.
When the blonde looks back up, Eve continues. “Just—I’ve been trying to deny it for so long, but—I can’t even tell you the amount of times people have told me my interest in you is so much more than professional and I—I just don’t want this denial to be part of us anymore. I can say with quite some certainty that I do love you. It’s—it’s unconventional. This. The way I’ve showed it. But…”
"We’re unconventional,” Villanelle suddenly whispers into the space in between them; and it’s so different from what Eve has seen on her face before that she almost swoons. It’s soft, so soft.
And Eve lets a small smile hug her features. “Yeah.”
“I think I’ve been trying to show you the same, Eve. I—I think I’ll need a while to—I mean, I’m still hurt about the whole—”
“I know. I’m sorry.” Eve steps closer once again, and lets her right hand come to rest on Villanelle’s cheek. Her thumb instantly starts caressing her skin. “I am so sorry. And I wish I’d come to understand my feelings before I did such a horrible thing. For now, all I can do is hope that it’s enough for me to be sorry.” Eve’s eyes lose their focus for a second, drop down to the blonde’s lips. She catches herself. Clears her throat. “Maybe, one day, you can forgive me.” It is but a whisper. Inaudible to anyone but Villanelle. But they’re them—and even in the middle of a storm, even with the wind blowing everything around them to bits, they understand each other.
Villanelle answers with a question of her own. “Do you forgive me for everything I’ve done to you, Eve?”
“Yes,” comes her immediate reply. It’s genuine, and she prays to whatever God Villanelle had found that she can read the sincerity on her face.
She can. Of course. Starts smiling. “Good. Then I forgive you, too.”
Eve nods, and, suddenly, there’s this tension that she feels so often when they’re around one another. She swallows the lump in her throat. It quickly becomes unbearable, the way Villanelle looks at her, the way she licks her lips, the way she—
And then Villanelle is kissing her. And Eve is kissing her back. With a desperation she has never known, never felt in her life. Her hands seek some kind of anchor to hold onto, and find Villanelle’s neck. Cling to it. Eve wants to pull her closer, wrap her arms around her, but she wants to be careful, too. Doesn’t want to hurt her.
Not anymore. That’s over. A thing of the past.
And so she tries to convey how much she wants this by intensifying the kiss, by burying her hands in Villanelle’s hair. By simply holding her. And Villanelle reacts to it. It’s beautiful. The way she moans, and groans, and lets Eve explore her mouth.
Eve can feel hands coming to settle on her waist, and the pure joy that fills her almost makes her want to break the kiss to make room for all the laughter that is bubbling up in her throat. Instead, she decides to just feel. To feel Villanelle’s fingers dig into her waist, holding on to her for dear life; to feel her teeth biting her bottom lip. To feel.
It all seems so clear now. That they were made for one another. It’s in the way they fit together. In the way they can read each other so effortlessly. In the way they make each other feel angry and loved and disappointed and happy like nobody else ever has. It’s in the way they can’t process a single thought as they’re embracing each other, are aware of nothing else in the entire world.
They may not believe in it, fate, but there is no other explanation to this. To them. It’s been meant to be all along. They have been meant to be all along. To exist not just in the same world, in the same space, but together. And now, after such a long time, it’s finally happening. It is nothing short of magical. Breathtaking.
Literally—when they break the kiss eventually, after many, many minutes, they’re entirely out of breath. But they’re smiling, laughing—albeit breathlessly—and, most importantly, still clinging to each other, unable to let go.
“We’ll take them down, Villanelle. I promise.”
“I believe you.”
“We’ll take them down, together, and afterwards, we can do whatever the hell we want—”
“Together.”
They go back to the hotel in the late afternoon, after a snack at a bar, and they talk about how to do what they have to do, and they talk about Alaska, and they share more laughter, and share the pain of all that’s happened, and they share love.