Chapter Text
It had been three years. Three long years that Eve suffered through, trying to find a new lease on life. Hadn’t happened yet. She couldn’t stop thinking about her. About her last moments. About moments never experienced. Moments lost.
Now she stood on the bridge they had stood side by side on so many years ago. A lifetime ago to Eve. She leaned on the railing just as she had on the cold, post-winter night, almost expecting a joking remark from a voice that she loved hearing. An accent she found so sexy and missed so much. Eve looked to her left. She could picture her there in her oversized yellow coat, smiling at her. Villanelle had thought herself a monster but she wasn’t anymore a monster than anyone else. She was just someone who had never had good guidance, never had love she could trust, and had never been treated with kindness.
That night they had been truly honest with each other. Had been on the verge of something that never had a chance to develop. Villanelle made the decision that they would walk away from each other. Even after they stopped and looked back at each other, Villanelle had walked away. It wasn’t what Eve had wanted. Even when Carolyn said she had to go “Cold Turkey”, Eve didn’t want that.
Villanelle had taken the fact that Eve wanted to “make it stop” that Eve meant to make the whole situation with her and Villanelle’s obsession with each other to stop. But it wasn’t that at all. She just wanted to make the whole obsession with taking down The Twelve and her former life that still hung around her neck like a noose, to stop. She wanted to run away with Villanelle but didn’t know how to express that.
So when Villanelle walked away, it made Eve believe that is what Villanelle wanted. After all she did to unravel Eve’s boring, safe life, she just left. Eve had been so angry with her. So full of hate that she became something else entirely. She became bitter and resentful. She threw herself into her obsession of bringing down The Twelve, everything else be damned.
But then, as always, they found their way back to each other. Two magnets that couldn’t be pulled apart for long. Eve finally was able to let her feelings for Villanelle be known. To let herself love this beautiful woman who drove her crazy in every sense, good and bad. Their time together, truly together, was so short and so tragic. But it was magical too.
Now there wasn’t a day that went by where Eve didn’t cry herself to sleep. Didn’t wish that she had joined Villanelle in death. Just to make this feeling of emptiness that she had been living with go away. She tried to drink it away, work it away, scream it away but nothing worked. The hole that Villanelle left in her couldn’t be replaced with anything. It wasn’t like before where anger and hate could fill the hole because this time Villanelle was not coming back. Before there was always that spark in the back of her mind that told her it wasn’t too late.
Three years, that is what she told herself. I will give myself three years to heal. But the healing never came. Maybe subconsciously she didn’t want it to? Eve didn’t know her own mind anymore. Grief was her life and she couldn’t move beyond it.
She looked out over the river that claimed her love and cursed it.
“I should have tried harder to save you,” Eve’s voice was hoarse as she spoke to the memory of Villanelle. “When I went back down to get you, I couldn’t find you. What I should have done was just joined you. Why didn’t I die too? I wish I had.”
But then who would be alive to remember me? Villanelle’s voice spoke in her head.
Eve chuckled at that voice. Always present but never there.
She pulled away from the railing and faced the way Villanelle had faced that night on the bridge, when they reluctantly walked away from each other.
I can’t see you. A whisper of a ghost said.
“I can’t see you either,” Eve whispered back and she started to walk.
She walked to the end of the safety railing that separated pedestrians and traffic. Instead of going forward she turned and stepped out onto the road.