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There is a room, there is a bed, and there is a woman. This is all you need.
People seem to think there is some difference between living, on one side of the line, and survival, on the other. It’s the kind of thing they say in movies, or in old books by old men that Konstantin likes, because he is also old.
Like most things, it’s bullshit. People stop living, they sit in one room and then they kill themselves, probably. It’s all the same thing. When you take the first heaping fork of an expensive meal taken alone at the city’s most famous restaurant, you are reminded that you are alive, which is quite the same as surviving. And food is the same as drink is the same as art and clothes and fucking; is the same as everything else that matters.
Here: there is a room, a bed, a woman.
You’ll survive.
Prison is just another setting. Another four walls, a few new faces, a different smell (usually bad). Villanelle has not changed for it, and she won’t. The times are tragic but they will build character – the very same character, to be clear, brick after brick of it ‘til she can’t be felled again. It is in prison that she first encounters Villanelle and decides to keep her, because she is who she’s always been.
She has pastimes. Staring, thinking; those are her favourites. Good thing she has so much opportunity for it, and so much delightful blankness to glare at while her brain turns over. There are women, too – most of them easily manipulated, because they all want something and she wants nothing and so she can pull on any rope without any chance of hanging herself, no, she is simply Villanelle. She fucks these women because they ask for it, or she asks them, and in return they give her other things – the things she really wants.
Rumours. Secrets. A reputation.
The prison sits low in the shadow of a mountain, and in the spring the snowmelt floods the lower floors. It smells dank as a result, almost rotting, and somehow this stench hangs about year-round, fading well after the seasons of flies and rats and disease have come and gone. It’s only when winter comes that you can be sure that you can take in a breath without choking on it. But then, the winter is cunning – it gets you in other ways. Just you wait.
The prison is the setting of horror stories, of gothic tales and unfathomable madness. It is here that Villanelle comes awake.
There is a certain way that it starts:
Eve hurts you.
“Oh god,” she babbles, after it happens. After she does it, spilling over like it wasn’t entirely intentional. “Oh god, oh shit, oh god…”
And you roll your eyes at her and press your palm to the scar, soothing the heat of its inflammation. “It’s not a big deal.”
“No, it’s – shit. I really didn’t mean to. I really didn’t. I’ll get you something, an ice pack, or –“
“No. Eve,” you tell her firmly. “It’s fine.”
“Really? It doesn’t hurt? It looked so awful, the way it tore…you’re not in pain?”
“No,” you reply. And it’s true, you aren’t in pain. Not in the way she means it.
“So, you’re okay?”
“No.” You let your hand fall and watch as Eve’s gaze drops immediately to your scar as it’s bared – newly opened. “I’m bored.”
“Oh. Okay,” Eve says, a little absently, still staring – like you aren’t here at all, a thing who doesn’t watch back.
You surge forward to kiss her, start where you left off – maybe with Eve’s sharpened, newly manicured nails well out of the way this time. But you’re just settling back into it when Eve pulls suddenly away.
She blinks at you, then at your wound. Her wound. Oh, doesn’t she love to reopen them, to worry at them – usually metaphorically. It was only a matter of time.
“We can’t – “ she starts, swallows hard. “We have to get you cleaned up.”
You look down to watch a dark bead of blood track down your abdomen, settling into the crease of your thigh. “It’s fine.”
“No, I don’t – I don’t want to. Not when you’re like this.”
Which makes you frown – you try on the way Eve always seems to do it, a little furrow of the brow, lips pulled tight and white. “Why not? You’re always angling for scenarios.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes,” you point out, running through a hundred such memories in your head, “you are.”
She looks at you. Later, you play it over, over again – huh. She might have been terrified.
The first time Villanelle gets sent to the Hole, it’s not an accident. It’s simply to see what all the fuss is about.
There is talk – and Villanelle hears all talk that is worth hearing. Oh, it’s horrible, terrible. You never want to get sent there. No food. No water. Barely any light – and in winter, none at all. You’ll cry. You’ll scream. You’ll wake in the morning in your own cold piss. You’ll think death would be better.
Villanelle hears all this and thinks, huh.
She’s curious, kill her. So she kills a guard, or tries to – but with no better weapon than the sharp edge of a lunch tray she doesn’t manage much more than a healthy count of grievous bodily harm. This is more than enough cause for her to be sent straight into solitary.
It’s a pride thing.
“Don’t kick the bucket, eh?”
Villanelle grits her teeth and stumbles forward under the guard’s fist, clenched in her collar like a mother and child. She doesn’t respond. Nobody here speaks any civilised languages.
“That, I mean literally. You get one bucket. You really don’t want to kick it.”
A bucket! Joy, joy. This is even more than she’d pictured.
They unlock the heavy iron door with a series of clanks and she’s shoved forward, but keeps her feet even as she turns to watch them swing it all shut behind her. Truly, this is an embarrassment of riches. The Hole is a good deal larger than she was led to believe – it’s at least two-metre square – and there is a rusted iron bucket in the corner. Which has someone else’s excrement in it but, whatever, beggars cannot be choosers and the bucket is its own quiet prize.
Some people come out of a few days in the Hole lanky and shaking, noticeably skinnier, shifty-eyed and sleep-deprived. It always takes them at least a few weeks to get over. But they are them.
Villanelle will come out of this exactly the same as she went in. With her head held high.
Eve asks you if you’re scared, and you wonder why you ever decided to love her.
But that’s a mistake, isn’t it? Choices are for ice cream. You only do what you want, you needn’t choose it. Eve suffers the consequences. More recently, both of you do.
Consequences like this.
“You really want to do this?” Eve asks, strike two. At least she’s not kind about it, there’s no concern in her blackest black eyes. Still, you scorn the question. You never ask. You are not one for questions; even less for answers. You just do the thing. Tonight is no different.
“Would you have more fun,” you jab back, “if I said no?”
Eve frowns, a sudden violence, and pulls tight on the last knot. It stings a little. You tense each of your muscles – from your head way down to your toes, the way you were once taught to test for an injury. Not a limb nor a whisper of you moves in place. Strapped in, all tight, all safe.
But you can still smile, and you do. Eve looks back with a continuation of that frown, hard as stone, and so you make yourself soft. You let your face relax and bare your teeth and let your eyelids hang lazily, everything open, all of it here.
Eve asks no more questions.
It’s perfectly fine. As ordinary, as boring and normal as any other day – as any other place. Prison is supposed to be punishment; solitary confinement, doubly so. For Villanelle, it’s just life.
It isn’t terrible, nor is it horrible. She uses the bucket so she doesn’t once wake up in her own piss. It’s dark, sure, but so is she. She rather prefers it – like a close blanket.
There’s not much else to say. It is what it is, as is everything. Not particularly interesting. Her curiosity is sated and she sits in it, letting time tick by.
She starts to count the hours. One, two.
Then the days. One, two.
And then the weeks.
Eve takes to it naturally. As predicted.
You watch, see, and thus you know. The way her hands curl about your wrists on occasion, so tight they leave circles of red on the skin that she never apologises for. The way she tells you, more often, Don’t move. Stay. Keep still.
And you don’t. Keep still, that is. You move quite deliberately, you don’t do what she tells you hardly ever, because if she wants that she’ll have to force it and where will the two of you be then? Somewhere quite different. You’ve been wanting to see if Eve would go there.
And she does. You feel a little smug about it.
Her kisses are different, that’s the first sign. They are less – messy, less open. More controlled. Exactly where she wants them, each press precise, and every flash of tongue or shine of teeth seems to be just as she directs it.
Power! Of course, she’s drunk on it – but that’s a terrible phrase, really. Power makes you still, makes you better and able and then you can walk in the straightest of lines and slice open the strongest of throats.
And the way she looks at you –
That’s different too.
In the night, there is a knock on the door.
Villanelle awakes – or perhaps just comes a little closer to the surface. There is little difference, here, between sleeping and waking. You dream either way.
She tenses, steadies, but her heart does not beat any faster. She breathes in and out in a measure of long seconds.
There is another knock. It echoes – not a fist but something heavy and metallic, scraping out something that is almost a note of music. And then – Villanelle strains to hear it – a scuffle, a low laugh.
How truly beneath her. To be submitted to these pranks – clearly she hasn’t seemed bothered enough by the Hole and its terrors, the animals out there saw fit to create some for her. Pathetic.
She falls asleep while the knocks still sound, louder and louder, and the tormenters jump and scream-laugh like puppets. She can sleep through anything.
The only thing that scares her, in all this time confined in darkness, in her own skin, is the sunlight. It happens when the next morning greets her and brings a friend-turned-stranger: the first ray of sun as the winter dies. She wakes to warm light upon her cheek, and she trembles.
Eve googled it. Ordered the ropes online. She may have watched Youtube tutorials.
You don’t care. When fingers trace along your skin, trailing black cord, tracing the red patterns left behind – it’s all Eve.
This is your gift to her! After all this time. You are so kind, so generous. Eve sees this, she must. The difficulty of opening, of vulnerability. The sheer impossibility of giving up.
Or, you let her think this. Truth is, you’re selfish through and through, and chances are this is all your gift to you.
She kisses you – you can’t kiss her back. Not really. You can’t chase it, press her for more, you can’t dig in or hold on. She can. She does, she is.
You’re fucked. Oh, you’re so fucked.
She touches you; you can’t do that back, either. You can talk, and you do this in abundance – she loves that – but you get no response aside from Eve’s tight mouth and more movement, more skin, more things you can’t do to her in return.
There is power in this, too, you’re sure. Eve is perhaps further gone than you are. Her pupils wide like a cat, gritted teeth, you feel her pulse racing in her fingertips – she’s high on something.
This pleases you like nothing else; you grin as Eve descends, kissing down the ladder of your ribs. She’s fucked. Oh, you have her surrounded.
Caught you.
At some point, Villanelle stops counting. The food is slop. The water is tepid. Villanelle fills the bucket and nobody replaces it. She starts to wake each morning in a pool of her own cold piss. Not because she has to; because she doesn’t care.
Hours, days, weeks pass. Curiosity sated. Knocks on the door. Laughter down the hallway. The sun caressing her skin, gentle and terrible. Alone.
Villanelle doesn’t care.
Eve stops, at one point, and it’s barely even started. She pulls away, a string of spit and sweat and you hanging from her chin. She wipes it off with the back of her hand.
You whine, because Eve likes that, and also because you feel like it. You were close, so close, and you’d hardly begun! But, you have the whole night. You have your own bed and room and a curtained window and the place already smells like sex, absolutely filthy with it. Your mouth waters.
“I, uh,” Eve struggles, not looking you in the eye. You wonder what set this off – what it was that pulled Eve out of the spiral of it, made her doubt and question, made her hesitate. It happens often, with her. You would’ve been surprised if it didn’t happen sometime tonight.
You let your shoulders fall further open, tip your head back on the pillows. That’s all you can move like this; everything else is up to Eve. And nothing but tight cord rubbing against your skin – you feel the air move over every inch. She watches you.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Eve says.
But she’s still palming your thighs, curling her fingers under the rope and pressing down. Being honest is not among her talents.
“Are you sure? I can be…“ You lower your eyes, stretch your neck, and when you look back up at Eve it’s through the flicker of your eyelashes. Something else, something softer, something more easily trapped and caught and killed…
“No,” Eve interrupts. Her voice sounds far away from herself. “Don’t do that.”
“Come on,” you tell her. “I was so close. Could you tell? I was so close.” And for added effect, “Please, Eve.”
She stills. She’s not meeting your eyes but staring between your legs, deep in your cunt.
After a moment: “Say that again.”
One day, they let her out.
It’s easy as that. She’s crouching in the corner – the day’s entertainment is rocking back and forth, feeling the slight tilt of air in her ears. It’s riveting stuff. And then the door just opens, and somebody just enters, and they just say, “We’re letting you out.”
Villanelle gets to her feet and pretends that her knees do not wobble. Pretends that she doesn’t smell of a dozen different bodily fluids. Pretends that her head is held high.
For weeks afterward, she wakes to chatter, to fluorescent light and hot food and showers, new clothes, to other people.
For weeks afterward, she thinks, I want to go home.
She doesn’t know what she means.
For a second, you think she’s not going to let you finish.
And that would be like Eve. That would be the most Eve thing of all, how terrifying! That she would torture you. That she would watch you sweat and whimper and cry real tears, and perhaps get herself off in the meantime. For that one second, you bask in it, you look forward to it. There’s something about cruelty.
But just as you anticipate the stilling of her fingers, they speed up, they press deeper, rougher, and Eve falls forward to kiss you and – she’s letting you. She’s giving you something, maybe that’s how it’s always been, is now. You scrunch your eyes tight as it peaks and Eve swallows your strangled choke, she takes that, giving and taking – a perfectly imperfect balance.
Everything stops. You rest easy looking at the backs of your eyelids. Eve’s hand still resting between your legs, the other one holding you by the hip. Her breaths hot on your cheek. Her heartbeat so quick and loud that even you can hear it, loud as drums if drums could beat like this inside your ears, beat you down.
Despite your best efforts, a tear or two leaks out anyway.
You’re worried that if you open your eyes, you might falter. That if you see her you might quake. A gentle thumb catches the stray tears on your cheeks, and when she kisses you then it’s so slow and calm that you could fall straight asleep.
She unties you first, which does require you to open your eyes and look at yourself – look at the way you look to her. You get it. Of course she’d be fucked like this for you, of course, she could never help herself and you look delightful. Debauched, even, that’s a fun word. If it were you you’d probably fuck yourself again, again ‘til the sun rose.
But she lets you go. She lets the ropes fall away and she pulls you close, tucks the blankets around you – still reeking of you and of her, again, filthy – and you lose your face in her hair.
She rubs the red marks over your thighs, all the places where you strained against her.
She must fall asleep after you do. The dreams come quick.
There is a room, there is a bed, and there is a woman. This is all Villanelle has ever needed.
People seem to think there is some difference between living, on one side of the line, and survival, on the other. It’s the kind of thing they say in movies, the French ones that Anna likes – she thinks Anna probably believes it, too. Villanelle was only too honoured to show her there’s more to life.
But like most things, it’s still bullshit. People stop living, sit in one room, and then they kill themselves, probably. It’s all the same thing. When Villanelle takes the first heaping handful of Anna’s flesh, taking her skin, her breath, taking her; she is reminded that she is alive, which is quite the same as surviving. Not that there’s much else, really, that can remind her. Especially not these days.
Here: there is a room, a bed, a woman.
She’ll survive.