Work Text:
Villanelle looked at Eve, who was sitting on the floor surrounded by a number of flat boards and a bag of various types of screws, with extreme skepticism.
“This looks extremely boring,” she pronounced, flopping down on the ground next to her girlfriend.
“You said you would help,” Eve reminded her.
Villanelle picked up the bag of tiny screws and contemplated it. She wondered, briefly, how hard it would be to kill someone with one. The long, sharp ones would be easy enough, but the wooden pegs would be a real challenge.
She put the bag down and observed Eve, who was studying a sheet of little pictures, her brow furrowed in concentration.
”You could let me go back to work,” she suggested. “I could earn enough money we could buy decent furniture.”
It took Eve a moment to register that comment and another moment to turn and give her a deeply adorable exasperated look. “Are you suggesting I let you go back to being an assassin so we don’t have to assemble flatpack furniture?”
“Yes,” Villanelle said instantly, perking up.
”Not happening.”
Villanelle deflated. “Then I do not see what I can do.”
Eve took a slow breath in and then out, steadying herself. Villanelle watched with interest. “Maybe read the instructions and help me figure them out?”
Villanelle picked up the sheet of pictures and contemplated them briefly. Her eyes glazed over. "Nope, nothing," she said.
Eve groaned. “You are a genius polyglot who can kill a man with a soup spoon.” Villanelle preened like she always did when Eve complimented her. “You can’t—fine. Can you just hand me things?”
Villanelle stretched out further on the floor, sinuous. “Mmhmm,” she agreed, though it did not sound very interesting at all. She supposed these were the kind of sacrifices one had to make in a relationship.
30 minutes later, they didn’t seem to be making much progress, but Villanelle was not bored. Eve’s frustration was fun to watch. Eve had been cursing and murmuring and screwing and unscrewing things. As Villanelle watched, she hurled an Allen wrench across the floor of their miserably small, by Villanelle’s standards, London flat.
Villanelle rolled to her feet from where she’d been lying on her stomach and retrieved it. She looked at the pile of boards in front of Eve, which seemed effectively unchanged from when they’d started. She looked at Eve, who had her eyes closed and looked like she was about to start screaming.
“This…does not look like a bookcase,” she observed.
Eve opened her eyes. “Honey,” she said and Villanelle mentally moved her ‘Eve mood tracker’ up a notch, from frustrated to outright annoyed. Whenever Eve started using endearments with her, she was more or less at the end of her rope. It still sent a strange electric shiver up Villanelle’s spine, a reaction to Eve’s mood that she’d never had with anyone else. “Could you please do something helpful?”
Out of desire to do literally anything else with their day and not at all because she found Eve’s actual annoyance indefinably distressing, Villanelle picked up the instructions and actually sat with them for a minute, chewing her bottom lip lightly. Then she reached for a board.
Eve watched, torn between amazement and hair-rending frustration, as Villanelle sorted out all of the parts of their bookshelf, then began to methodically to assemble it.
“Why are you so good at this?” she protested, watching her girlfriend carefully check the screws were in place before tightening them, forgoing Eve’s normal method of tightening one and then realizing all the others were misaligned
Villanelle glanced back to give her a look Eve could only describe as affectionate contempt. “Eve. This is very easy. The little pictures show exactly what to do. A child could—“ Whatever she saw in Eve’s expression caused her to end that line of thought without finishing the sentence.
Eve contemplated all the reasons she couldn’t strangle Villanelle, starting with the fact that she loved her and ending with the fact that she would lose the fight and still wouldn’t have a bookshelf.
Villanelle scooted back from the finished shelf, making a face as she brushed off bits of particle board. “There. It is done. Can we—“
“You realize I’m going to make you do the rest of them, right?” Eve asked, motioning to the other boxes of furniture currently occupying their shared space. Villanelle’s face fell.
“No. I protest. I am going on strike,” she said.
Eve had always thought that there was a degree of healthy manipulation in every relationship, where you had to know what tools you had to motivate your partner to do things. And by this point, she had a fairly good handle on where Villanelle’s buttons were.
She still felt herself flush with embarrassment before she even spoke. “Do you want a reward?”
The speed with which Villanelle whipped towards her was like a cobra striking its prey and her expression was barely less predatory. Eve felt a different kind of flush along her neck.
”Are you trying to bribe me with sex? We are already dating, that is not a convincing offer,” Villanelle said, as though she hadn’t just reacted with almost terrifying intensity.
Eve slid along the floor until she was close enough to brush her lips against Villanelle’s with the lightest of pressure. “Thank you,” she said.
Later, she would be aware that Villanelle had purposefully put one hand against the back of her head to keep her from braining herself on the floor. Now, she was just aware that she had been sitting up and then was suddenly on the ground, being straddled by her girlfriend, and being kissed for real.
“The furniture,” she protested weakly when Villanelle had broken the kiss to move her mouth down to Eve’s jaw, and then down her neck.
“It will wait,” Villanelle said.
Eve slid her fingers through Villanelle's hair and pulled her back up to kiss her, losing herself briefly in the heat of the other woman's mouth. When they pulled back, both of them breathing hard, she murmured the least sexy phrase in human existence.
"Can we at least assemble the bed?"
"Eve," Villanelle said, with a hint of real distress in her voice.
"Please?" Eve said, her very real desire to keep going being combated by her desire not to roll around on a floor in which there was at least one spare nail in a bag somewhere.
Villanelle levered herself up enough to look down at her. Not for the first time, Eve found herself lost in the way that Villanelle's gaze devoured her, like someone experiencing an almost religious ecstasy.
"Fine," Villanelle said, brushing her fingers through Eve's hair for a moment, toying with strands of it with slightly shaking fingers and then she was up and on her feet in one fluid motion.
"But the bed is the very last thing we are assembling for today."