@afterpale : i would have broken everything. i would have killed anybody to have you back here with me.
"i don't want that," says eve, shoving clumps of bloody gauze into the too small trash can. "you almost died. do you realize that?"
she can't help it. she should be angry. furious. outraged, even. the way that dasha wanted her to be furious with villanelle when she stabbed nico with that pitchfork and tried to make it look like it was villanelle's work. but her tone can't quite get there, not with this. at most she's hitting exasperation. looking at villanelle feels like someone's hitting her in the sternum, like she was taught how to relatively recently. it pushes the breath out of her and when she pulls it back in, all she can manage is this. a weak protest.
it doesn’t even feel real. it feels like lip service. it’s the tone she might have used when placating nico about how far she was willing to go to catch this assassin.
eve closes her hands into fists. tight. so, so tight. she can feel the edges of her nails digging into her palms. "isn't the whole thing that you were changing? no more killing? emerging from some chrysalis like some... some good bible-thumping butterfly? i mean, clearly that's not true. look at yourself." she throws out a hand towards villanelle's outfit, bright and obnoxiously patterned. it's a little bloody along the spine still, and it's definitely not the outfit of some good christian girl.
they're separated just slightly by the barrier of the bathroom door. villanelle is sprawled out on the bed, halfway tilted onto her side in order to peer at her.
eve stares harder at the trash can. her hands are red. like when she stabbed villanelle for the first time in that paris apartment. the first time they ever really saw each other, exactly as they were. almost separate from her brain, her hands shake a little, miniscule repetitive tremors that she can't even feel. "everything’s broken," eve says, and she means herself and the world and villanelle, too, mere feet away after she tried so hard to push them apart.
her eyes sting. she shuts them tighter.
“everything’s broken already.”