Chapter Text
1923
Eve stares at her reflection in the tiny bathroom mirror.
Against her temple there’s a single strand of silver hair shining under the fluorescence. She yanks it out. She leaves it on the counter.
How much longer can you keep living like this? Her reflection asks her.
She scoffs. The way things are going—
Fucking forever.
*
The chicken carcass on the kitchen counter has been sitting there for the better part of the day. Eve has been chopping vegetables all afternoon; carrots and potatoes and onions, stacked in tall heaps until there’s no room left for them. She has no appetite. Whatever she wants for cannot be satisfied so simply.
If she cooked the chicken now it would probably make them sick. She imagines Niko’s face, grey with nausea, the cloying clumps of rotten flesh she would have to scrub from the bowels of the toilet. It would keep her hands busy. There are only so many vegetables she can cut before she turns the blade on herself.
Maybe, if she leaves the chicken out for another day or two or three, she could kill him with it. Blame it on bacteria and whatever chemicals were pumped into the air during the war. Blame it on—
“Eve!”
Her hand slips and the blade slices her palm. Blood seeps from the thin red line and drips down her wrist, pulled that way by gravity. Eve feels the swoop of it in her gut and clenches her hand into a fist. She’ll have to throw out the potatoes; Niko won’t appreciate the metallic taste on his tongue in the same way that she will.
“Eve,” he says again. His voice wary, his face aged and confused. His hand reaches for her and stops short. “I was calling you for the last five minutes.”
“I’ll have to throw out the potatoes,” Eve says. The blood in her fist breaks through the gaps in her fingers. She walks herself to the sink and shoves it under the spray of the tap. “I can get more.”
Niko glances at the piles of vegetables. “I don’t think we need—”
“We do,” Eve interrupts. The wound stings. “I can get more.”
“Eve,” Niko says. “Are you okay?”
What a stupid, stupid question, Eve thinks. “Yes,” she says. “I’m fine.”
“You weren’t answering me.”
“I couldn’t hear you,” she tells him. “I’m making dinner.”
Niko sits heavily at the kitchen table. He steeples his hands and rests his chin against them, staring ahead quietly. Eve huffs and wraps the tea towel around her still-bleeding palm. The house grows silent and it sets her teeth on edge, so she moves out from behind the counter to take herself back to the bathroom. She wonders if the hair will still be where she left it, taunting.
Her foot is through the door when Niko next speaks. “Have you met your soulmate?”
Eve’s body shudders to a stop. “No.”
“Eve,” Niko warns.
“Don’t.”
“No,” he says. He’s pushing back, and she wishes she could welcome it. She wants to want this fight. Instead, she forces her body into forward motion. The sound of a chair scraping echoes behind her. “Eve, don’t walk away.”
“I need a bandage, Niko,” Eve says. “I’m bleeding.”
Niko follows her up the stairs. His footsteps are heavy on the carpet and his breath tight as he ascends. Not for the first time she wishes he had died at war. It’s not selfish, if the sacrifice would have been more pleasurable than the aftermath. Niko should never have left her if he was planning on coming back.
“We need to talk, Eve,” he persists. “We can’t keep stepping around the elephant in the room.”
“I’m not stepping around anything,” Eve says. “Because there is nothing to step around.”
“You met your soulmate.” His tone isn’t accusatory. He leans against the doorframe to the bathroom; the fluorescence makes him look infinitely older. There’s more grey in his hair, these days. “Did you know?”
“I don’t believe in that crap,” Eve tells him. “There isn’t enough evidence to support the idea.”
She refuses to acknowledge her reflection in the mirror. She only looks once a day, now; the first five years of stubborn disbelief melted far too easily into the last five years of quiet denial. The only change to her features is the addition of a permanent frown. She doesn’t need to see it to know that it’s always there.
“There is evidence, Eve,” Niko pushes. “You’re just too pig-headed to believe it.”
“A few noble men announcing that they finally see the colour of the sky or taste for the first time in their lives only means two things.” Eve rips a strip from the bandage with her teeth. “They were unhappy with their marriages, and they needed an excuse.”
Niko frowns. “It’s not that simple.”
“You would know, would you?” Eve snaps.
“You would know.” Niko shrugs and steps into the bathroom. He takes the bandage from her, and then cradles her hand between his own like it is something fragile. Or maybe the look on his face is resignation. “It’s never that simple, no matter how hard you try to make it that way.”
Eve swallows. “I didn’t ask you to stay.”
“I know,” Niko says. “But I stayed anyway.”
And there it is. The decision he’s been holding over her head for the last two decades, finally torn loose from his clenched fist.
“What do you want me to say?” Eve whispers. “That I’m sorry you had to make that choice?”
“No,” Niko says. “I know you won’t mean it.”
When did she get so angry, anyway? When did she get so bored? Was it after she stepped into the house and saw her there, after the yelling and crying and fighting, after the fucking guilt had crawled through her insides and made a home in the deepest, most rotten part of her? Or had it been simmering, weeks or months before she had to see the goddamn smile fall from his face?
There is something impossibly devastating about finding out the man you married has a soulmate. It is a cosmic joke to know that it is not you.
“You would have been happier with her,” Eve says.
“I’m happy here too, Eve.” Niko wraps the bandage around her hand carefully, his calluses rough against her skin. “Even if you aren’t. I don’t regret my decision.” He brings the back of her hand to his lips and presses them to her knuckles. “I married you.”
“And not even half a year later, you heard Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5,” Eve says softly. The fight has left her and she wishes she could drag it back into the room with them. “It was the first time you’d ever heard music. You hummed it for months.”
Niko’s smile is watery. “Terribly out of tune, I presume?”
“Horribly out of tune,” she confirms. She sits on the edge of the tub and he joins her after a beat, his weary body creaking and moaning. “And then Gemma was in our house.”
“I might have been careless, in that regard.”
Eve scoffs and keeps the malice out of it. How can she blame him, when he had just met his soulmate but had a new wife at home? And he’d done what most men wouldn’t by staying, and instead of loving him unconditionally for it she had resented him. The problem was her.
It had always, in some way, been her.
“It was a long time ago,” is what Eve settles on saying. The wound on her palm throbs and she thinks of all those red-ruddy potatoes on the counter. The chicken—she was going to do something with the chicken.
“Yes,” Niko agrees. “It was.”
They sit in silence that isn’t entirely uncomfortable; it’s the nicest they’ve been to each other in recent years, and the irony isn’t lost on Eve. There are layers to Niko just as there are layers to her, but she’s never bothered to peel them back. Gemma would have.
“So,” he says next. “Who is it?”
Eve shakes her head, fingers pressing into her temples. “I don’t know.”
“You’re not getting any older,” Niko points out. “I’ve spent the last ten years watching… That’s the rarest type, you know.”
“I can’t speak for the rest of the population, but I can think of nothing worse than living forever.”
“War,” Niko says immediately.
“I would rather a million of them,” Eve says. “I don’t care that it makes me selfish. Death was something I had left.”
Niko nods. “When was the last time you wanted me, Eve?”
Her tongue is too quick, her teeth sharp. “When I could use Gemma against you and know that it hurt.”
She doesn’t have to pretend anymore. She wishes it felt more like relief, but instead it’s stifling, the thought of one day being without him. Not because she’ll miss him; that would be too easy. Eve crumbles at the knowledge that he and everyone else will leave her behind. That somewhere out there is the perfect half of her soul, and she’ll be forced to spend eternity searching for them.
“What does this mean for us?” Niko asks.
“What do you want it to mean, Niko?”
He stands and brushes off the seat of his pants. There’s a hole behind the knee that she’s been meaning to patch for months. Does she stay out of pity, the way that he did all those years ago? Or does she go back to denial, her oldest friend, and pretend that she can feel her bones growing brittle the way she once could?
“I don’t really know, Eve,” he says gently. “You’re sure you don’t know who it is?”
“How could I?” Eve says. “If it really was ten years ago—”
“It was,” Niko interrupts. His smile is self-conscious, unsure of sharing something that once would have made her swoon. “I noticed. I noticed… Almost immediately.”
“I saw a lot of people ten years ago,” Eve finishes softly. “And it didn’t feel any different. I really don’t know.”
“That’s okay,” Niko says, then pauses. “This is the longest we’ve spoken to each other in years.”
Eve wears her tight-lipped smile like a prize. “It’s a shame that it no longer matters.”
When Niko leaves, Eve closes the door behind him. She forces her body to turn until she’s stood in front of the mirror and all of her flaws are forced to stare back at her. She pinches some colour back into her cheeks, smoothes her fingertips over her eyebrows. Her stomach swoops again.
“Beautiful,” she murmurs. The tie holding her hair is yanked out and she lets the curls fall unruly down her back. She runs her unbandaged hand through it, feels all of it catch and pull.
She thinks of fingers, long and slender. She thinks of coming apart, cracked ribs ripped right through her sternum, and then she just thinks of coming. She can tell Niko that she doesn’t know who her soulmate might be and it still won’t help her sleep at night.
It’s been ten long, stupid years, and Eve can’t get her out of her head. Oksana has burrowed beneath her skin, sucked sense right out of the middle of her to make room for herself. She can’t tell anyone that the woman she let lick into her against a bathroom sink is the one she’s allegedly destined to spend her life with; she can barely tell it to herself.
She hasn’t seen her once since that night. It makes her inexplicably furious.
And yet above it all, she can’t help but wonder if this—Eve, herself, stripped bare in all of her unashamed, rage-filled glory—will finally be violent enough for Oksana for it to be real.