An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 2/5
Fandom: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Characters: Villanelle | Oksana Astankova, Eve Polastri, Konstantin Vasiliev, Carolyn Martens
Additional Tags: POV Third Person, Past Tense, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence
Summary:
Konstantin and the Twelve fake Villanelle's death. Eve thinks she's dead. Villanelle thinks Eve is dead. Life resumes without the other until it doesn't.
Author’s Notes: Thorns is a collection of vignettes and is basically a short story. It’s supposed to represent the random memories and thoughts a person has, whether they’re about the past, the present, or the future.
Dependence
She drinks cherry Coke on what seems to be a regular basis. It doesn’t bother anyone but her. She has what she would call a dependence on caffeine, and it reminds her of an alcoholic. There was, she thought, such thing as a caffeine addiction; it would explain why her parents had drunk coffee all the time even though she insisted they didn’t need it. (She distinctly remembered the one time her father had given up coffee for Lent and he complained of headaches and mild shakiness—displaying the very mild symptoms of withdrawal.) She could break the habit anytime she wanted to, and once she did succeed at it, but the urge for a caffeinated drink is strong at times.
She tells herself that caffeine is the only way to survive her freshman year of college. She’s not old enough to drink in America, and when she realizes that—on a daily basis—she wishes she were in England. There, the drinking age is eighteen. There, she could drink all she wanted, even get drunk on occasions when she wanted to feel the blissfulness she’d experienced in Seville, Spain. She hadn’t been drunk then; only tipsy, but the feeling of happiness was one she didn’t forget. She laughed at everything, even if the subject wasn’t a funny one. She was certain she’d chatted her mother to death on the walk back to the hotel whilst chugging a large bottle of water to dilute the alcohol in her system. All the while, she thought to herself, I’ll never experience this again. Should’ve eaten food; I wouldn’t be as tipsy if I’d eaten something, too.
When her anxiety gets to her she craves alcohol instead of cherry Coke. She’s afraid of becoming an alcoholic and afraid of the alcohol becoming a coping mechanism when she’s faced with the daunting task of living her life.
A Writer’s Will is a Writer’s Way
Emily was, at heart, a writer. Even if she didn’t have a pen in her hand, she was almost always writing. She made up stories in her head in which she met celebrities, either ones she’d been an admirer of for many years or ones she was in love with. She made up stories for the characters in her novel, ones where they ended up happy with the person they were in love with, or a situation in which the worst could happen.
Today she writes furiously, having gotten over writer’s block just hours before. She writes about nothing in particular; she writes about whatever comes into her mind. One of the joys, she thinks, about being a writer is that the writer is God. They are the creator of the world unfolded in handwritten or typed pages and they can easily destroy it with a single sentence. She likes to be evil when writing, and relishes in the feedback on published works when people tell her that she’s evil for killing off their favorite character, or making sure their favorite character didn’t get the happy ending they deserved. But she likes the feedback when people tell her they enjoyed reading her story and liked the way she wrote the characters in said story. To her, feedback is everything. And playing God is everything.
But there’s one thing, when it comes to writing, which she can and can’t play God with, and that is her own novel, finished just days ago. Written over a period of two years, she wrote it at a time when her life was beginning to take a dramatic turn. It had, at that point, already taken two dramatic turns: She’d fallen in love with a female friend and, thinking it was predatory and wrong, the friend had rebuked her confession, signaling the end of the friendship—which had, one year later, somehow managed to be re-kindled—and then lost her best friend to a rumor. Those events, however, were not the ones that inspired her novel. She didn’t know what inspired her novel besides the fact that she was beginning to fall into depression and into a trap where someone she admired became a demon. The novel started as a way to write about this demon, take that person’s life and fictionalize it. It worked in the beginning, but the more she wrote the novel, the more she realized that it was about the demon but it was also about herself. And so the novel became a coping mechanism. She could play God in her novel all she wanted. She took the demon’s life and intertwined it with her own and the characters’ original stories and it slowly became this tangled web of dealing with the people in her life the only way she knew how: Writing about them.
In writing, I can understand and put together how I feel about people. I can get a better grasp as to what’s happening to me.
The playing God stops, of course, when it’s about her own life. Emily could very well make everything up, but she finds that it’s not exactly easy. She has to put pieces of herself, of her life, into every single piece that she writes. She wants there to be elements of truth in her writing, so that when someone comes to her and asks, “Have you been through this, too?” she can answer, “Yes.” She wants them to be there so that every single person who reads it will know what she’d been through.
“They hurt me, and here’s what happened afterward.
They hurt me, and this is how I dealt with it.”
Happiness is Somewhere
Finding happiness, to most people, is simple. You don’t worry about the things that’ll come and you don’t worry about the past, because the past is behind. You just focus on today, live in the moment, and try not to be sad.
Happiness, to Emily, is as rare a phenomenon as meteor showers. She has good days where the demon and the depression and anxiety are far away, trapped behind a door. On those good days her smiles are genuine, her laughter can be heard more often, and she walks with a spring in her step and can listen to her favorite band on repeat for hours. She has bad days where she feels like doing nothing but staying in bed, because getting out of bed is a chore in itself. On bad days she’s actually torn between wanting to go to class and wanting to stay in bed. Going to class means that her mind will be taken off whatever is on it, even if it’s only temporarily. Staying in bed means wallowing in those thoughts but it means sleeping.
She has heard many times to find happiness in the little things. Sometimes she does. She finds it in walking around the empty campus on weekends when everyone goes home, in the colors of the leaves as the trees stop producing chlorophyll to prepare themselves for the long winter months and the cold that would come with a vengeance. She finds it when she’s around her siblings and Newell as they laugh about something silly someone or other did. She finds it sitting at the duck pond until the late hours of night, even in the cold, listening to the sound of the night and the water and the few number of ducks that still swim in the water. But the little things, even if they spark up some sort of joyous feeling inside her, never seem to be enough. The sadness always comes back, sometimes worse than before. Even if the happy moments are there, the sadness lingers. She’s the rabbit, the sadness is the stalking wolf—it’s only a matter of time before it consumes her.
Emily thinks the key to happiness is just running away from everything. She thought that college would do her well—and in some ways it has—when she realized she would be leaving home, turning the page in her book of life to start a new chapter. It was a new chapter, yes, but the demons she thought she was leaving behind somehow caught up to her. For a month they were confused, possibly still hungrily searching her home to find her, and when they realized she’d left, they found her at the university and wreaked havoc. So no, she can’t run away from them. They’ll catch up to her. She can’t beat them; nobody can. The only things she is capable of is being aware that she’ll have off days and good days, and learn to tolerate them.
She used to think happiness was in family.
Her family means well, even when they tease her, but they don’t realize that their words hurt her. They don’t realize that the words they say go to her head and swim around for days. She doesn’t tell them that their words hurt because she’s afraid of backlash, of them saying “Suck it up. You’re an adult now; you’ll learn to deal with it.” She has dealt with them, wrestled them, but the only things she is capable of doing with those words are repressing them, burying them deep so that the pain is less prominent. Though sometimes the words come back to haunt her: I didn’t raise a slob. Eat something. Did you eat least eat some fries? Are you breaking up with me? You’re capable of more than this. You’re above average. Eat some more, aren’t you hungry? You think you might be gay? You’re depressed? (You don’t look like you’re depressed!) With all that you’re eating, how are you still thin? That’s really all you’re having? Are you going to wear that every day and rub it in our faces? Try not to be sad, okay? Grandma loves you, Emily.
Happiness isn’t there, even when the laughs echo and all she can do is smile and shrug off the teasing like it’s no big deal, like it doesn’t hurt her.
She used to think happiness was in friends.
Her friends, even if the circle is small—she’s never been a social butterfly; she’s an introvert; she’d rather spend nights at home alone rather than go out and be with people—try their best to be there for her. She appreciates every single one of them, especially her newest best friend. But they’re busy half the time to text her back or hang out. She understands that. They’re all adults now, and adults lead busy lives. When she hangs out with friends, with her best friend, the sadness runs away and hides. (It’s afraid to show itself because it’s afraid of judgement!) She has a good time with them. But when she comes home, the sadness comes out from hiding—since no one is around—and it dances around her skull. You just had a good time, now let’s make you feel like it wasn’t worth your time!
Happiness isn’t all there either.
She used to think happiness was with significant others. The list is short: Two ex-girlfriends, two years apart. One she doesn’t like much, even when they talk. The first ex means well but Emily doesn’t like talking to her, because she’s afraid of her. The first ex is a psychology major and it seems like she knows Emily better than she knows herself. She doesn’t like to talk to her. She recently ignored her request when the first ex asked if they could be friends again. The second ex she still talks to on a more regular basis. The second ex is an entire continent away and speaks a language she doesn’t understand. The second ex is kinder and gentler and understands her; it’s no wonder Emily has kept her on the friend list. But both those relationships ended on a bad note. Both those relationships had been rather long, the second one being almost an entire year—an achievement for her! She’s afraid of commitment. She’s already lost people that were special to her—the ex-best friend—and she doesn’t want to lose another.
Happiness isn’t all there either.
She used to think happiness was in music. She knows one song well on guitar and can play ukulele decently. She enjoys playing music. She enjoys listening to it too, especially her favorite artist. But there are times when she can’t stand her favorite artist—they’ve had a love-hate relationship going on for almost two years now—and can’t stand when people talk about the lead singer. The demon. The Renaissance Painting. The demon’s music is her killer and her savior all in one.
Happiness is hardly there.
She doesn’t know where happiness is anymore.
To Be in Love
Love is strange.
As far as she knows, there are two definitions of love. She once wrote them down as this:
1. Love (verb): Something received and given to family, friends, or significant others; something that consumes you and fills up every corner of you.
2. Love (noun): An abstract feeling that one feels but can hardly explain.
The official definition, of course, was as follows:
Love, noun
1. A profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person
2. A feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend.
3. Sexual passion or desire
4. A person toward whom the love is felt; beloved person; sweetheart
5. (used in direct address as a term of endearment, affection, or the like)
6. A love affair; an intensely amorous incident; amour
7. Sexual intercourse; copulation
It made her realize that a person could experience the seven definitions of love in their lifetime, and perhaps all at once. She believed that those seven definitions were correct, though she felt she would add an eighth: Obsession.
Obsession had many definitions as well, but she didn’t go into those. She felt that love and obsession went hand in hand at times, hence her eighth definition. When in love with someone, a person was inclined to think about that person whether they wanted to or not. They would think about them twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The person never left their mind. So she believed that to be in love with someone you had to be obsessed with them.
Emily is the kind of person who, against her will, falls in love easily. Her family is, in short, not a very affectionate family. Certainly, they could give hugs when they wanted to, but it wasn’t enough. No one in her family was as affectionate as her; they didn’t constantly long to touch and be touched like she did. She didn’t, however, fall in love with people who hugged her or squeezed her hand. No, she fell in love with kindness. Kindness came first, then the personality, then the looks… The Renaissance Painting, the demon, described this very well: She was in love with everyone she saw. Emily then narrowed it down to this: She was in love with everyone who was kind and also attractive. (She may say that looks aren’t that important, that they aren’t everything, but in all honesty, they played a large role in what she looked for.) She was in love with the demon, she was in love with her older brother’s wife, she was in love with a tall, brunette, married actress for what seemed to be no reason at all—she’d simply gotten under her skin and burrowed her way into her heart. And these people she was in love with all had one thing in common:
Kindness.
“I fall in love with kindness because it’s the one thing I look for.
I fall in love with it because I can’t help it.
I fall in love with it because somehow, no matter what I do, they get under my skin, into my heart, inside my head, and they refuse to leave.
To be in love is to be killed with kindness.”
End note: The seven definitions of love were found on dictionary.com
