confession-bound (killing eve | eve/villanelle, eve & elena)

[fiachairecht]

confession-bound (it's all horizon). killing eve, eve/villanelle, eve & elena. a changeling: the lost au in which villanelle has some gifts for the autumn court's finest. 1.5k words, rated t. for Alfer in auexchange 2020.

Eve is an Antiquarian
Villanelle is a Dancer
The music box plays Scriabin's The Poem of Ecstasy op. 54, because Villanelle is not one to pass up the opportunity of sending sexy yet vaguely menacing gifts.

The music box ballerina spins lazily, each stick-straight carved strand of her hair firmly in place as her arms move up and down, up and down. The scent of jasmine spills from the dark wood with every twist of her body, which contorts in ways no wood should ever move as Eve watches, transfixed, her headset forgotten on the desk next to her.

"Hey." 

The balled-up paper hits the side of Eve's head and she frowns, shakes her head and sends it flying back over the makeshift divider between their desks. "I need to concentrate," she says. Has the ballerina's skirt changed colour? "Villanelle is trying to tell me something."

It's a long musical piece — over ten minutes, and it hasn't looped back to the start. Does she have to walk in a certain direction as long as the music plays? Look it up, rearrange the composer's name to find a secret message? Find a Nightsinger with fingers like piano keys that Eve could fit her own hands over, play the music like a summoning?

"Oi." This time Elena throws a pen, and Eve winces as she reaches up to rub her head and just pulls it further into her curls. 

"What?" She complains. "Villanelle's important."

"Yeah, I'm aware, thanks," Elena says. She's trying very hard not to sound annoyed, and Eve looks up guiltily as Elena continues, "And your very important girlfriend has left us another body to look at."

Eve jumps up so quickly her wrist catches on the ballerina's outstretched hand, its pointed fingers digging in between her tendons like it's looking for something. But she doesn't have time to dwell on the sharp, grounding pain. "Can I see it? Where is it? Who is it? Does Carolyn know?"

Elena's eyebrows rise with every question, and in the silence that falls after the last one, Eve realises, not for the first time, that she's probably said way too much about Villanelle way too quickly.

"Eve, come on, it's Elena. Stopped you from falling into the goblin market Elena, let you drag her backwards through the Hedge Elena. You could at least do me the courtesy of pretending you're not pining after someone the whole of the Autumn Court has declared public enemy number one."

Eve sighs, rubs her eyes. They keep the office lights low, but it's still too bright — spilling in through cracks she never would have thought existed — and it's making her head hurt as she tries to think about both of Villanelle's gifts at once. "I'm not pining. I know for a fact that she likes me."

Elena blinks, and Eve watches her make conscious decisions to not say at least three things before she says, "That's one of the more terrifying things you've ever said. Recently."

"Shut up." Eve shoves her hands into her pockets, then immediately has to take them back out to collect her headset and keys. "I just like new things, is all. It's a change from..." Arcadia. The libraries. Everything she tries so hard not to think about anymore.

Who could blame her for loving being at the centre of Villanelle's attention, after decades alone?

*

Carolyn's standing at the base of the road leading up to their crime scene, looking every inch the Autumn Queen even in the grey tweed skirt suit she wears when London Freehold's affairs brush too closely against the mortal world's. It's a mostly changeling crew under the tent, but Eve can pick out the human Met officers easily enough. Villanelle must be getting bolder.

"It's not a pretty scene," Carolyn says, eyeing the two of them suspiciously. There's less doubt there than there was when she first asked them to start helping her, but there's still something — a lingering uncertainty, a challenge that Eve sometimes feels she's just waiting for them to fail. Once upon a time, right after she and Elena had stumbled from the Hedge and into the Freehold, the thought of failing Carolyn Martens would have been unthinkable; now, the thought that Villanelle would be waiting for her on the other side is making her question everything she usually thinks of as failure.

"I can handle it," she says, but she can tell by the way Carolyn's eyes narrow that she let the silence go on for too long. "Is Villanelle still here?"

Carolyn raises one shoulder in a shrug, why don't you know, you're the expert, and Eve feels heat rise in her cheeks.

"Sorry," Eve mumbles. Thinks about the words carved into the music box, sorry, baby, and wonders if she'd missed something, if whatever's waiting up the hill is her fault. "Let me go up alone. Just in case."

Carolyn nods, short and sharp, and gestures towards the crime scene gear laid out on one of the tables. "Gear up," she says, and then, as Eve passes her, "And fix your Mask, too, it starts slipping when you get too excited about her."

Eve snaps the gloves over her hands, feels her skin wrinkling under the smooth latex, and doesn't dignify that with a response.

*

She'd expected — she's not sure what she'd expected. Blood, maybe. Bodies, definitely, or at least one v the sort of corpse as modern art installation that had defined so many of Villanelle's early kills, before the two of them had met face to face and Villanelle had stopped trying so hard to impress her.

Well. Impress her with corpses, at least. Sometimes she thinks she can still feel the expensive silks Villanelle had gifted her, long after she'd taken them off and shoved them in the back of her closet because no matter what Elena said, burning them was unthinkable.

But there's none of that in the small cabin. It's empty of any life, empty even of anything that might once have been alive, though the overturned furniture, scattered books, and broken lamps are sign enough that something had been there. Like she was looking for something, Eve thinks. She lifts a foot to step over the threshold, into the chaotic scavenger hunt that Villanelle had left for her—

—and sinks to her knees, the pain of a thousand bramble vines wrapping around her chest, her wrists, her ankles as invisible thorns pin her to the floor. She reaches out, searching for the smooth wood of the doorframe, and finds only the ragged edges of whatever gateway Villanelle had torn through the world before she left.

A trap. Had the Queen known? Was that why she had agreed so easily to let Eve come alone?

"No," she gasps. "No, Villanelle, come back here, you don't get to do this."

The only response she gets is the faint sound of laughter as she struggles to her feet. It feels like climbing a Hedge more than anything else, and the ache skips straight past her skin and travels through her bones. "Come here," Eve repeats, and can't quite bring herself to say please.

But she does manage to make it into the room — the room that isn't the room anymore, the room that's draped in elm and alder and the sharp scent of crabapple — one of the chairs has been righted and Villanelle's sprawled over it humming the song from the music box, pink tulle skirt all tangled up in twigs and leaves and all sorts of other things Eve can't immediately identify. She can hardly tell where the clothes begin and Villanelle ends, and the fact that she can't see any blood is almost more worrisome than if Villanelle had been covered in it.

"You're late," Villanelle pouts. "I was so bored Eve, so bored I wanted to kill something. And it would have been your fault for leaving me all alone."

Eve steps forward, more tentative than she wants to be, and as her foot hits the wood she realises she's lost her crime scene gear somewhere along the passage. "You know you don't have to do that to get my attention."

Villanelle jumps up, opens her arms wide in invitation, and the Wyrd burns inside Eve, desire and warning and the recognition that always comes with Villanelle — same, same, same.

She ignores Villanelle's waiting embrace and sits down in the abandoned armchair, which is as soft as rose petals, and when Villanelle settles into her lap, wraps her arms around her neck, she says still. "You can't keep doing this," she says. Waits for Villanelle to say something, anything. "We can't. I can't."

"We can," Villanelle says, voice muffled as she buries her head in the crook of Eve's shoulder. "Autumn fears you, and I would never do anything but love you. I made a door, just for you."

"That's not love," Eve says, but her lips are moving against Villanelle's skin, and Autumn's fear in her chest is too tangled with Spring's desire for her to truly believe it. Maybe it's close enough, for a changeling, maybe neither of them will ever know, but — it's Villanelle.

In the end, that will be the only thing that matters.

"Come with me," Villanelle murmurs into the kiss. "Eve, you know you're wasted here, you know the Freehold is stifling you. Come with me and I'll show you all the new things you could ever want."

It's too much like the promise Carolyn once made, but this time, Eve finds it easier to believe.

In the now, she opens her mouth for Villanelle's kiss again and again as the Hedge closes in around them.