Chapter Text
i. │Philophobia│ – the fear of emotional attachment;
fear of being in, or falling in love;
…
This sandy-rainbowy-marbly-cottony-candy-ish path, it’s not for you. It’s not yours. It’s stolen. Fogged. Surreal. Hollow… Your fate, macabre and mean, laughs wickedly, reaches its bony-skinny hands to cover your eyes while you’re balancing on the precipice of a dark abyss… It’s not you wearing the scar near your heart, but there’s a matching hole right between your spine and left shoulder blade: bottomless, black, all-consuming, unglue-able and unsew-able… The emptiness and the nothingness will never stop howling through this hole, will never get tired of it…
---
You stare. You’ve been staring for the last twenty minutes, maybe ten, maybe thirty, maybe the whole morning or the whole eternity. It’s is a ‘yes’. A ‘yes’ screaming right into your unblinking eyes with the two explicitly clear vertical lines on the nitrocellulose membrane housed in the white plastic shell.
The world is still and silent around you. You’re not that easy to scare (you used to be called reckless and fearless once but face it, not anymore – not when you have her to lose), but you know your body too well, had to learn each and every reaction it could produce when you were a child, so you recognise fear as it crawls under your skin and twists its ugly tentacles around your visceral organs. Your stomach drops down, bottoms out and clenches painfully into a knot. Your heart palpitates, increases its speed and intensity of beating to an extent when it starts swinging itself against your ribcage with such a force that you wonder what will give in first: the bones or the muscle. Your diaphragm spasms and it’s one of those irritating feelings when, no matter how deep you inhale, it’s not enough – as if your thoracic cage cannot expand any more, or your lungs fail to perform their function and any amount of air that is being forced into them is not enough. Basically, you can barely breathe. Basically, you’re suffocating.
You’re sitting on the toilet lid but you don’t need to get on your feet to know that your knees will wobble, your backbone will change its composition into jelly and the room will start spinning and the walls narrowing around you if you do.
She made you promise to wait for her. She made you promise not to check without her. But you’ve never been known to be a patient person. Ain’t a patient person you are, that’s it. And when on your jog early this morning you bumped into a young woman with a wailing baby, it jolted you into a pathetic panic attack. You got into the 24/7 pharmacy across the street on your way home and bought the stupid thing. You couldn’t wait longer, you just couldn’t - you had to know. Curiosity killed the cat though, didn’t it? So, now you regret it. Now you’re sorry, so-so sorry you didn’t wait because you’re scared as hell and terrified as fuck, and the fact she’s not kneeling beside you and not cupping your face at the moment makes it a tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold worse.
You stare. You’ve been staring for the last twenty minutes, maybe thirty, maybe... whatever... What exactly is the purpose of your staring, again? What are you hoping to achieve, huh? Do you think it’s gonna disappear? Un-show the result? Erase the second line? Isn’t it ironic how the saying about the abyss that gazes into you when you gaze into the abyss, relates precisely to you right now?
You stare, you stare, you stare. You feel the tears prickling behind your eyes, but of course, that’s only because of how dry they are, because of all this staring. So, stop staring, don’t be stupid – it’s not gonna go anywhere now. It is a ‘yes’ and it is probably the scariest thing, the proof of existence of the most terrifying monster you’ve ever seen in your life (and you’ve seen a lot of monsters that were much scarier than you, let’s be honest right now). How is it again? Battle not with the monster, lest you become a monster.
This ‘yes’ is scarier and more dreadful than even the first one you received as soon as you got home after your run (‘Point the absorbent tip into the urine stream for at least 7-10 seconds… Re-cap the device and place it horizontally on a clean, flat surface. Wait 5 minutes…’) The first one is now resting on the countertop near the sink, forming a neat row with three other ‘yes’s from the different tests you bought after you’d had the first: after you’d taken the shower and gotten into your senses, and run yourself out of your flat and into the same 24/7 pharmacy across the street literally in nothing but your kimono. This ‘yes’ is scarier than the four previous ones because it’s like capital punishment, it’s the final sentence, for there’s no doubt now that it is a ‘yes’.
But why are you so scared? Didn’t you expect that so soon? It’s not the first time you’re carrying another life in your body tho, is it?
What do you remember about the first time? What were you? Fifteen? No, probably thirteen. Right, thirteen - your last year in the juvenile delinquents’ centre. You remember the guard banging it into you against the tiled floor of a shower room, his hands over your mouth and throat. You remember the others scraping it off of you, and puddles of blood and tiny clods and chunks of flesh on the same tiled floor a couple of months later. You remember bleeding and fevering for a long-long time after it all was over. You remember how surprised and amused they all were when you didn’t die, curled into a ball in the corner of your room, like a dispossessed stray dog.
What do you remember about the second time? What were you? Twenty-one? Right, your first year in your training program for the Twelve. You remember one of the instructors drugging you – enough for you to lose control over your body but not enough to pass out. You remember Dasha making you take some pills two months later. You remember her oohing and aahing over you but not because he raped you but because he was dumb enough not to use protection; not because you were bleeding and vomiting and soring but because you had to skip three days of training to recover. You remember them feeding you this same instructor as your first kill after the course was over. You remember him launching at you, remember getting his knife, remember the blood from a thick cut in his carotid splashing your face and your chest and your now empty abdomen, and his huge cumbersome body crumbling in front of you.
You don’t think about those two lives. Never. You have no regrets. Eve doesn’t know about them and will never know about them, because what is the point of knowing about them at all? They’re not here, they never had a chance to become something other than a bunch of cells placed inside of you without your permission or content when breaking your body and mind. They were not special. They were not beautiful. They ended up to be the same rotting organic material, just like anything else…
But this time is different. This time you planted it there voluntarily, intentionally, after Eve had spent hours and days scrolling through all the available donor banks all over the world, carefully and meticulously going through the photos of the genetic material until she found the one that looked like your carbon copy (I want this child to be the second most beautiful person in the world, Vil). This time it’s there to stay and that’s what scares the shit out of you, isn’t it? People like me aren’t supposed to reproduce, Eve. Because people like me give birth to the people like me. That’s how monsters come to this world. It’s a closed cycle. But she didn’t listen. She never listens, your Eve, does she? And now it’s there, and it’s gonna stay there. And your body, which is a perfect killing machine, now will have to become proficient in an absolutely dissonant, alien and unfamiliar function of making a life instead of taking a life.
The alarm on your phone startles you. It’s time for you to start getting ready; Eve’s plane will land very soon now.
You shake your head, slap yourself when it doesn’t help. And when the blood rushes to your face and the skin of your cheek starts burning, you finally restore control over your limbs, make yourself swallow and get to your feet.
Before you leave the flat, you sweep all the five pregnancy tests off from the countertop and throw them into the litter on your way to the car. You can ask Eve to buy another one later. You can pretend there’s still a point to buy one. She will kill you if she knows you didn’t wait for her.
---
You don’t know how long exactly you two had spent running and running and running together, because time is a very peculiar thing and a weird concept – there’s no point in counting months and days when you’re lost to the world, when you don’t really exist anymore. But Eve says that when late this March Carolyn called her and said that you were officially licensed to breathe again, it had been about two years after the bridge; after your point of no-return; after she had refused to walk away on you, had chosen to stay.
Existing together had proven to be better than not-existing together, and then there were two months of nights and nights and nights keeping each other awake in beds, atoms around you communicating through the charged tension between forbidden hearts, minds buzzing with electrical determination to absorb each other; measured breaths and hopeful looks; a mouthful of thoughts matched with a handful of words to express them; bitter black coffee and sparkling wine and much stronger spirits cleansing your throats under the early risen sun and pale phantom moon; warm and crunchy pastries after an endless day cracked; sarcasm and inappropriate rude jokes; weightless touches and lingering kisses, all tongue and teeth; expectant eyes and hopeful, fractured smiles, silent laughter and hushed voices; black-framed glasses on the top of a messy dark-haired head, crisp white sheets of expensive hotel rooms all over the world and the last sunrays casting on the naked bodies through the curtains of opened windows…
Then there was her sudden stillness, chewed lips and fingernails, and restlessness. This chaos of hers that makes the cogs in her head rotate with a speed of light and create the friction no one can fight and the pressure no one can take; this chaos of hers she tends to wear in the inside where no one but you can see it. And this obsessive idea of hers that ended up pushing her to tetter on the border with madness: I’ve never wanted this before but now when with you, I want a child. I want a child. I want a child with you… And who are you to say ‘no’ to her – this is the only flaw you’ve acquired just recently.
Then there was a wall in her office in your flat, meticulously filled with charts and plans tracking your cycles as obsessively as she used to track your killings all these hundreds of years ago. And then an appointment in the clinic in Madrid.
And finally, there were these last two weeks. You pouted your lips and told her you wanted her for yourself only before (‘if!’ in your thoughts) all this madness starts and surprisingly for yourself, you found her smiling and nodding, Okay, and you felt taken aback and pretty dumb because you had the whole list of bullet points prepared in your head, all starting with an asterisk and lined up neatly under the heading ‘Why We Should Have Another Vacation Just for the Two of Us’. You took a train to the east from Madrid, to Sa Tuna. And you think these were the happiest two weeks of your life. Jumping into the water from the rocks when the wind blows into your faces. Escaping to the secret caves on the beach to wait until the storm is over. Flashing a dazzling, sincerely grateful smile to the old lady next door when she gives you a huge bowl filled with peaches and persimmons from her garden. Walking into the thick morning fog of the hiking trails, throwing warm jackets and blankets over her shoulders. Ignoring all the incoming calls. Sitting on the beach wrapped around each other, feet and hands covered in sand, arguing about who’s gonna go to the fishermen to ask for a knife to cut mango and pomegranate because for once, you don’t have one on yourself. Kissing her behind her ear and nuzzling your face into the notch between her collarbones, your head cradled to her chest while she’s watching summer fireworks, flashing out and crackling above the sea…
---
‘Officially licensed to breathe’ or not, you take different flights back home, just in case. When travelling together it’s almost impossible to stay low – she is utterly breathtaking, you are utterly devastating, how one can even blame people for noticing you, for staring at you. So, you arrived yesterday. Eve’s plane has just landed.
She presses you into the door as soon as you get inside of your flat and it closes behind you. She presses you into the door and presses her body into you, and as her fingers tangle in the hair at the nape of your neck and her lips slam into yours, parting, you feel all the heat of the sun radiating from her. It burns you through the fabric of her blouse and your t-shirt, and in all the places where your bodies touch.
Your hands snake around her waist, you rub your nose against the tip of hers as you pull back just enough to take a breath. It seems like being able to tolerate 30 hours without this was in a different life now. You’re dizzy and breathless, your blood is bubbling under your skin and your fingertips produce electricity as you trace the contour of her jaw, but your lips twist into a wicked, beaming, smug-as-fuck smile, “Someone missed me.”
“I want you,” she exhales against your mouth, nips teasingly at your bottom lip, and when she draws back extending her hand out for you to take, you obey and take it silently, following her across the flat and to the bedroom.
As your bare back slides on the mattress, she crawls her way into the bed after you. You’re a jumble of tangled limbs and kissing lips and tousled hair, and when with one jerk of her hips she straddles your lap and her hands reach to trail the curves of your sun-kissed body, capturing your breasts and hips, you almost laugh at how desperate and starved she is.
“Poor Eve,” you purr into her hair, dragging the first vowel of her name, as she kisses under your jaw, where your chin meets your neck, and her lips trail a wet line to your clavicle, and to your solar plexus. She nibbles along the curve of your breast lovingly and you reiterate, “Poor baby,” chuckling, but simultaneously her fingernails graze over the thin pale line on your stomach, and suddenly your brain short-circuits and this combination of a word and of her touch, sends you spiralling. You suddenly feel like falling.
…How do you tell her about ‘It’? How do you call ‘It’? How do you pronounce ‘It’? How do you spell ‘It’? How do you write ‘It’ down between the lines that describe your life on the vellum paper of your consciousness? ‘It’ is totally invisible under your skin where she’s touching you right now, under the jumble of muscles and other bodily tissues, but now that you know that ‘It’ is there, you cannot unfeel ‘It’, you cannot unsee ‘It’ - ‘It’ is shining brighter than anything possibly can…
Your eyes fly wide open and your reach down between your bodies to take her hands in your own and to make them stay where they are over your lower abdomen. She starts rolling her hips against you. You inhale, you look at her to take her in. Her stomach is toned and tanned as a berry, she still smells like the sea salt, cloves and cardamom, and fuck, you’re obsessed with her. You want her insanely, uncontrollably, irrevocably. You want her so much that your skin burns and your chest aches, so much that you can die if you don’t have her right now. You want her but your brain just keeps spiralling and you keep falling…
…How do you call ‘It’? How do you spell ‘It’? You’re taking a deep breath as if it is scripted for you to take a deep breath, and lie down on the silver surface on the top of the mountain. What if ‘It’ is the moon path that appeared in the screenplay when no one was anticipating it and looking for it? You’re the accounter of losses, manager of guillotines, executioner of slaughterers and slaughterer of executioners. You were never supposed to go through this path – you’ve always had another path to go through. If there was supposed to be any reward from this life for you at the end, then it would have been there not earlier than everyone else dies. But you’re alive. You both are so much alive right now…
Her hips roll again and her hand slips from under yours to slide lower to where you desperately need her, but you catch it again and return it back to your stomach.
… Because ‘It’ is there – under her hand, under your skin, under the jumble of muscles and other bodily tissues, - and ‘It’ is there now. It would be stupid to deny it – not after five (five!) ‘yes’s you got earlier in the morning. So, how do you call ‘It’? How do you spell ‘It’? How do you write ‘It’ down? How do you tell her when you didn’t wait for her but you know ‘It’ is there?...
Her hips roll, and she leans in to pepper open-mouthed kisses over your neck and jaw, until your lips meet again. Her hands make another attempt to escape and to cup your breasts, but when for the third time you stop them where they are, her hips freeze and she straightens her back to look down at you.
“Vil, wha-…,” she smiles at you, a furrow between her brows and a mix of confusion and concern in her shining in the dimmed light eyes.
You bite at your bottom lip, grab her hands tighter and press them into your body harder, palms flat over your skin.
Her gaze flicks to where your hands are, her frown deepening as her eyes return to meet yours again. She shakes her head, her hair splattering around her face in this crazy black halo you’re fond of so much.
“Sweetheart, I don’t - …”
“ – Eve!” your breath hitches and you stare at her, pleading to read your mind, pleading to understand you, begging not to ask you any other questions, not to make you say it out loud because you can’t. Because you’ll crash if you have to, you’ll fall into smithereens, you’ll crumble into the space dust in her hands.
Your thumb brushes over her knuckles, you feel her fingers twitch under your palms. You watch her brows raising in surprise and eyes growing wider and wider as realisation sparkles behind them. She beams at you and huffs out a half-laughed half-whispered, “You…?”
You blush and nod, desperately hoping that you answer the question you think she’s asking, and that it’s the same question you want her to ask. Eyes bright and warm, the corners of her lips spread into the widest, most real smile you ever seen on her face (and you’ve seen a lot of them by now, you’re basically fluent in her smiles) and she laughs, sonorously and deeply. Her hands move from your stomach to your shoulders and to your face, and she closes the distance between your faces bumping your lips into a dizzying, exhilarating kiss. “Oh my god, Vil. Oh my god,” she chuckles again and again between the soft kisses she smears all over your face and when one of them lands on the tip of your nose, you find yourself smiling back.
She is not angry you didn’t wait for her. She’s not even annoyed. She is happy. She is so happy it seems she’s radiating light and her skin is buzzing under your touch; so happy she can’t stop grinning even as she slides down your body, covering every inch of it with kisses again. She is so happy it seems it’s contagious and you feel this weird feeling in your chest that’s exploding from the inside, from the core of your heart. If your heart is a muscle, can happiness be a muscle, too? Can you allocate it before it sets an arson fire that will burn you down to the whispering ashes?
She falls asleep beside you, with her head on your shoulder and a smile still frozen on her face, after drawing at least a couple of hundred of infinity loops on your stomach. You lie awake, breathing her in, staring at her, then staring at the ceiling, then back at her again. She is so peaceful and content, and happy (gosh, what an annoying word, have you ever noticed it before?), and you think you must be happy too, because isn’t a happy Eve the only thing that makes you happy? Yes! Yes! Yes, of course, it is. It IS! But it’s just… How do you call ‘It’? How do you spell ‘It’? How do you write ‘It’ down now that you know that ‘It’ is there, under her hand, under your skin?...
---
>>> Okay. Just to be clear, in case you will turn out to be a terrible person or simply a very ugly baby, it’s not my fault. It’s never (ever!) been my idea in the first place. Apart from this, I have a very beautiful face and have always been cute, even as a baby. I am amazing and flawless, perhaps only except for my inability to say ‘no’ to your mama, but sometimes when you love someone, you will do crazy things. Hence, you exist. You’re welcome.
Anyways. It looks like we are going to be stuck together for a while (plus your mama’s elbow is poking my ribs, reminding me quite eloquently about my manners, and manners are everything), so let me start again.
Dearest… Alien (?)
How do you do?
The roses are sure beautiful at this time of year, aren't they?
It has been great talking to you, what a shame I got to go.
Cheers, V. >>>
---