and your heart's already given in (killing eve | eve/villanelle)

[fiachairecht]

and your heart's already given in. killing eve, eve/villanelle. eve waits for villanelle to make sense. 689w, rated t. for a prompt at bring her bleeding heart to me 2019

"Precision bites." Eve lays her fingers against her neck, mirroring the dark, grainy pools in the photograph, and starts at the cold. She hadn't noticed it when her fingers were wrapped around her vodka cranberry, but she supposes it makes sense.

More sense, at least, than the body in the snapshot.

Vampires didn't kill prettily. The ones who didn't want to be noticed didn't use their teeth, and the ones who were too much something even more other than bloody vampires ... well, those ones didn't usually bother to even leave all the pieces in one place.

"Pre-ci-sion bites," Eve says again, and this time she digs her nails in a little, just because she can. The bartender gives her a wary look out of the corner of his eye and moves two patrons down, left hand free in case he needs to sweep her glass away.

Not that it would make much of a difference to Eve. It's Villanelle's fault she's like this, not the vodka's. Villanelle's fault that she's alone at the bar, that she has this picture in front of her.

Villanelle's fault that her blunt nails are totally failing to even dent the surprisingly strong skin right underneath her pulse point.

God, Villanelle's teeth must be like knives. She probably had a chance to study each individual neck, decide exactly where to bite, where to slice, how to drain out all the extra blood that she didn't have room in her trim, compact body for.

Villanelle's own neck must be strong too, and her jaws. Or maybe she was just fast, fast enough that her teeth were like little bullets, gleaming white like the slash across the dress she'd sent Eve, the dress Eve had half-consciously slipped into before she left the house earlier.

The dress is still pristine, despite the griminess of the bar. It's a proper bar, somewhere Niko and his mates might go, nothing like the pubs she and Elena usually wandered to after work. It makes her feel dangerous. It makes her feel like she's waiting for Villanelle.

It makes her feel alive, like she'll only be alive for another few moments and then Villanelle will step out of the shadows and sink her teeth into Eve's neck, and Eve will fight back, just her hands and maybe her broken glass, better than a toilet brush and just as useless. They'll end up on the floor together, Villanelle's hands at her throat, everything covered in blood — in both their blood — and once they're alone—

Eve shivers, runs her tongue across the edges of her teeth and doesn't think about how human teeth were also perfectly capable of puncturing human skin, if someone was determined enough. She'd seen it before, one of her very first cases back when MI5 was just beginning to start understanding the scale of the vampire presence. Wrist torn out, traces of saliva, feral vamp — except when they'd found the woman and her hoard of finger-bones two weeks later, the one thing everyone could agree on was that she was very, very human.

Eve had worn a hand brace for months afterward. It was the only way to force herself to do nothing about the thing she couldn't stop seeing every time she closed her eyes, the silent movie of her pulling out her own bones for the woman, just to see if she could.

Villanelle wouldn't make a mess. Villanelle would pin her down and leave bites in a perfect necklace, the prettiest thing Eve had ever owned. Villanelle would bite her so carefully the blood running down her shirt and in between her breasts would be a thin trickle, hardly distinguishable from a spilled drink.

Only they would know, Eve thinks, the only two who mattered anymore in that situation. She thinks Villanelle probably knows that much, too, or else she wouldn't be leaving these messages for Eve in her kills.

The one thing Villanelle doesn't know, Eve reflects as she dips her fingertips into her vodka and presses the sticky crimson dots to her neck, is that Eve doesn't think she can be careful in return.