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"You are running," says Elektra, with her lips and not hands, though Maya doesn't doubt her knowledge, or that her hands would be as graceful as the rest of her. Her face, though-that would be a problem. Maya has long learned to divine the subtlest nuance but Elektra is inscrutable. A steel wall.
She thinks about her father's gun, heavy over her heart. How that was a lie too; symbolism turned to ashes, like her father, like everything. She thinks about Fisk; how she could always pick him out of a crowd, and how much his approval had meant, how much he had meant. She thinks about looking him square in the eyes and pulling the trigger, more bitter than sweet, vengeance satisfied but heart empty. Promise me, he'd said, and Maya did, because she can't and she wouldn't, and at least that, of the wretched, sordid whole of it, had been true.
Yes, Maya thinks; yes, I'm running. She doesn't say it but she doesn't have to, not when she's been pressing fingers to her memories like a bruise and Elektra's scrutiny is a palpable thing.
Elektra nods, as if satisfied.
A dark night. The wind on her face. Elektra's sai at her throat.
"Who are you?"
Maya bares her teeth in a parody of a smile. "Just an echo."
It almost sounds like the start of a joke:
An echo and an assassin walk into an art gallery. The assassin with glasses over her face, a scarf over her hair, like ten women Maya's seen on a given day. Maya's mind is a steel trap but Elektra is a master of reinvention; woman made shadow made woman again, and Maya pays her no mind, because there is nothing to pay mind to. She studies a display, absorbing the texture and color and intersection of styles. This is how she spends her days since New York. One month in Florence, another in Paris, now in Berlin.
She doesn't perform. Maya has always loved an audience but the joy of it is lost to her. Not even the vibration of a hundred hands can pierce through her isolation.
She paints, or tries to, and ignores the increasing sense of restlessness, of futility.
Something gives but not in the way Maya expects.
Maybe she shouldn't be so surprised. She's always loved to dance.
"Could you kill me?" Maya asks. "If you had to?"
"Yes," Elektra says, evenly, and it's not a lie, but it's not quite truth either, because Elektra will always fight to live but Maya's visual recall makes her one of the deadliest opponents she could ever face.
(Maya is not a mark. Maya is not collateral. Maya is innocent but dangerous all the same, and it thrills something primal in her, makes her want, sharp and sudden.)
Maya smiles, like it's a joke, and perhaps in a way it is.
"You fight like Bullseye," Elektra says, pressing the tip of her sai to her throat. Maya lets her. She knows how good she is. "Like Daredevil."
"And you," Maya says, because she's danced with death and she's still alive. She grins, fierce and bright. Matt says things she's never read on lips before but Elektra - -
Elektra is poetry in motion and it calls to Maya, to the dancer in her.
"Yes," Death says. "Like me."
Elektra doesn't kill her. Not that night or any other.
There is always a mistake and Elektra keeps making the same ones.
Outside it's raining. Maya upturns her face to it, the way a child might, and misses Elektra's smile, a flicker of candle flame in the dark.
"I think you would have enjoyed my play," Maya says, dragging her nails over Elektra's scalp. "It was about two shadows, dancing away the night."
Elektra scrapes her teeth over the inside of Maya's thigh. "Right now I am enjoying something else."
"I can't read your lips from here," Maya says, around a moan, and Elektra huffs out a laugh, lets her feel the vibration of it against her clit.
This is the divergence.
It's never been about winning. It's a dance. It's a reclaiming. It's the iron in her mouth and in her blood and maybe the dark parts of her won't stay buried but maybe there's a sort of purity in saying mine, not yours.
She's not running, not from this. Not from her. Maya arches into Elektra's hold, licks her lips for good measure. She's the expert at pattern recognition and she knows that look in Elektra's eyes, feels it like a palpable touch.
"You win," Maya says, smiling breathlessly, every atom in her body concentrated on directing internal thought into external action: Touchmetouchmetouchmepleasetouchme.
Losing, as it turns out, is its own kind of victory.
Maya isn't innocent. Not really.
Her father's gun, heavy over her heart, and blood like a question mark, and the lips she kissed only once, bringing her world down around her.
Matt and Fisk. Fisk and Matt.
She's only ever left with echoes in the end.
"We are what they made us," says Maya, "but we're also so much more."
Elektra says, "Yes."