.a/n.: adjusted some parts from the AO3 posting at the end, and will be swiftly updating that upload as well. I cut out a lot from the middle of this fic that did the work that these edits did, as I just thought the fic was too long. The public posting lost something i think was key in balancing the ick of Venom and the ick of Adam. thank youuuu and excuse the mess!

.x.

A month later, the technology – and Eve herself – are deemed stable enough for the next step. They'd been having drawbacks over the last while, the kind that made Seth swing between locking himself in his ivory tower of research, and showing up distraught for Adam to pat his head and praise his research and call him a good boy.

Eve, through it all, wasn't told anything, but she just seemed to know. "Is something going on?" she'd asked Adam once, helping him with the dishes from one of their dinners. "The researchers are...getting pretty snappy with me."

She wasn't supposed to call them researchers – they were footmen, maids, staff, anything but that. Adam didn't correct her.

He'd said cagily, "Stuff's tense further up the food chain, that's all."

But now, Eve feels the excitement too, though he certainly didn't try to fill her with any. "Something's changed?" she asks him, as they both look for her other shoe that's she's misplaced – fair enough, since she never needs them. She walks barefoot, and has told him she misses the feeling of the forest floor. She observes him and asks, face lighting up, "Something's gone right?"

"Yeah. And I wanted to take you out to celebrate. If we can find this shoe."

"Out?"

"Out." He emphasizes, meeting her eye.

She grins. "Oh. In that case, the shoe's under the sofa."

He smirks at her and fetches it, a bit too haphazardly thrown under there to be actually lost. It hits him that she must have thought he was taking her to another examination or something.

They head out of the bird cage, Adam's hand between her shoulder blades. His mouth feels a little dry. Seth gave him clearance, and everyone knows it, but still they do double-takes when they realise who's on his arm. Eventually they slog through the scrutiny (Eve smiling the whole way), and cross a glass pedway to the researchers' quarters.

He lives here now, a little peace offering from Seth. As if Seth knew how empty his real home felt. Maybe it's like how he's locking away Eve from Nemu - he's hoping to train Adam to only remember the lab, the white walls and glass frames, a mission and a paycheck.

Good boy.

Eve is bouncing on her heels as he unlocks the door to the flat. He pushes the door open – she barrels in – and freezes.

She asks, "Where are you?"

He doesn't get the meaning until he sees how she's scanning the unadorned walls, the nondescript furniture, the featureless shapes of pre-packaged existence. She migrates to a stack of mail on the counter, a mug with a ring of stained coffee inside. She holds onto the mug.

He says meekly, "I don't go into town much to buy my own things."

Eve peers at the mug. "It's blue," she says, her voice mild. At that, she hurries into the next room, and the next, and then his bedroom. She tugs open his closet and the hangars scrape as she riffles through: "Why do you keep your coats in your bedroom closet?" She sounds gently relieved. Finds a little box on the top shelf of buttons to replace on shirts; she holds tight an open packet. "Do you break them often?"

"I guess so." He wants a story of how it happened once. Anything to fill the emptiness of his life.

"You sew them on?"

"Yeah. That's about as much as I can do, though." He hesitates, feeling like this was a huge mistake and not quite knowing why. "Maybe you could teach me."

"Okay," she says. "Okay."

Eve sits on his bed. The duvet is a nondescript grey, and he'd made it this morning before leaving, pillows orderly. Did he think it'd impress her, this cleanliness? Her blue eyes search every corner of the room. She says, "My room has more of me in it than yours does. And my room is fake."

Adam sits next to her. The emptiness pushes in on him like the room is slowly losing its air. He sees it too, now - he sees a ghost just passing through. He's been here a long time. He's been befriending Seth, working with him, funding the project, becoming this intrinsically involved with it, falling for her – but all that these walls communicate is someone only here to get in, break Seth, get out, and fucking run.

He says quietly, "My life feels a little fake too."

She laughs softly. "You may as well live in mine."

"I'd like that."

Eve looks over at him, her gaze earnest but pitying. She sets her hand on his. "I thought you were bringing me out? To the town?"

He looks into her expression, conniving and yet so openly asking permission. She wants to go. And she knows she has to ask. To walk, to talk, to be his. He wants her to know that he doesn't ever want to tie her to permission – he wants her to take things whenever she damn well pleases.

He would give anything to walk the compound with her – no, to take her into his town and show her the carriages and beautiful architecture and his favourite bookshops as a boy – no, to take her to Nemu, and see her family hug her.

But he doesn't have anything to give but lies and guilt and captivity.

"Sorry, Eve." He kisses her forehead, hand still under hers. "I can't. God, I wish I could. But you're too close to the surgery... We shouldn't risk anything, you know?"

"I'm not so delicate," Eve argues with a soft disbelieving laugh. She pushes his shoulder a bit.

"I know you're not. But no one else does."

"Well! Maybe they should bother to get to know me."

He thinks so too – he's so sick of hearing her be called Miss Zvezda, or worse, MA. That term with so much hope packed into it, for something none of them can define.

"I wish they'd learn everything about you."

Eve's smile tilts mischievously. Her fingers squeeze his. "Well...some things, I want to keep just for you."

.x.

There isn't much to work with, but Eve seems to like the change of scenery. He brings her up and down the halls, where there are portraits of past founders and donors and their stories – Eve stands beside every portrait and imitates their stuffy poses, Adam coaching her and joining in. He takes her to the glass pedways where they can see the sun set into the village at the bottom of the valley, and he teases her about painting it, but she says she wouldn't ever get the colours right. He's briefly horrified when Eve finds a security office and begs the officer to let her in, and she speaks utter excitable nonsense into the intercom. He buys snacks from the canteen as it's closing down and she's enamoured by them for their novelty even if they aren't that great and she's eating them on the floor underneath steel ceilings.

And then he takes her back to his room, and his mind is trapped.

What happens when Venom wears off?

He wonders this sometimes in the dead of night, but he can brush it away. But now, his thoughts are like streams pushing to a single source – Eve, Eve, Eve – and this vicious little question can't paddle to shore.

She brushes her teeth and washes her face in his bathroom, door leaned shut. He stares at the stock in the cabinet, little vials nestled between his headache remedies and melatonin. Seth insisted he store them here for today, just in case.

Just in case of what , Seth? If she isn't entirely pliant? In case it wears off?

Can Venom ever wear off?

They've never given the poison the chance. Seth had a schedule and they kept to it, telling Eve the injections were to bolster her immune system. But it's a little vial of curses woven by an enthused Aphrodite.

She turns the water off. She's humming some song she brought in from her village, a waulking song she tried to teach him on the way here so now it's stuck in her head.

If Venom...if it did wear off, would it take away the memories completely? Would she see the puppet strings criss-crossing her life?

Or would Venom just...just fade, until her memories of him were wrapped up in fond feelings and infatuation that she couldn't summon any longer? Maybe she'd look back on their time together (on tonight) as a dream she's half-forgotten.

…Well, too late to worry. She was given a dose this morning. He feels a bit sick.

She steps from the bathroom, and he's caught by surprise by her hair being down. Cascading down her back in blue, her hesitant hands drawing it over her shoulders and braiding it at her temples to keep it out of her face. Eve throws herself backwards onto the bed beside him , her face full of completely unabashed sunlight.

"Eve, we should – "

"Don't." She finishes the French braid and knots it off, and he's caught watching where the strands weave back from her temple, all the messy perfection of it. She leans in and kisses him. "We talk about everything. We plan everything. I don't want to talk about this, okay?"

"We…should," he repeats lamely.

"Yeah, 'cause that's romantic." She inches closer, the mattress sinking their thighs together. "Are you worried?"

It's not quite mischievous – she's honestly asking, and that makes his stomach flip. She has no idea what she's asking. What she's doing. He should take her back, right now - if not for how she's holding onto him.

If not for how he's cherishing it.

His gaze follows the warm line of her thigh and pooling skirt pressed against his leg, the curve at her hip, the hand propping her up and where her pinkie finger hooks under his; the concerned blue of her eyes and the weaving strands of hair and the minute part of her lips while she looks at him, and looks at him, and looks at his mouth.

This is his apartment, and this is their moment. Seth can't take this away.

He kisses her instead of answering and feels her seriousness unravel into a smile as she cups his jaw. She arches into him, her shape lithe and insistent, other arm thrown around his neck in unabashed enthusiasm – that smile turns into a grin, like she just can't believe her luck.

He pulls her sideways onto his lap so her legs dangle off the bed; she happily kicks one slipper off, but she can't quite manage to slip free the other. Her immediate comfort with him sets his racketing heart at ease: if she can find assurance in him, then surely he can too.

And there, then: the hem of her skirt catching around his wrist, the fabric of her stockings under his hand. Finally that other shoe hits the floor with a muffled thunk and she giggles into his ear. In the shift from one of her breaths to another he becomes very achingly aware of how high her collar is tied and how heavy her skirt is, and it is a strange blessing to be able to indulge in that thought safely, with her taking his wrist and leading his hand up her calf.

.x.

When the plan had first been proposed to her, she'd wondered, amongst a million other things but this question ringing the loudest, how?

How were they supposed to be her children? She had no idea what went on in the laboratories. She knew no spell for this. And she certainly didn't know any science.

But after living here for a while it became clear. Science and glass and needles and scalpels. They were going to be her children (her children!), but there wasn't going to be a wedding or anything.

That wasn't fair, she decided.

She was doing something more important than anyone else, and something way scarier, and something that pulled at the seams she'd made between her life as it was and her life as she wanted it, sewing in a new thatch of fabric, pretending all the hues matched when they didn't. It patched the hole. But it wasn't quite right.

People like Seth couldn't make it quite right because they didn't care to.

But Adam did – or at least, she'd make him understand how to.

Science and glass and needles and scalpels.

She needed those things for their future: all her friends and family and the people that smiled at her through the glass every day… but for her, she needed this, Adam's hands in hers and his shy kisses down her neck.

She feels warm, from the inside out. She flexes her toes in the cool air but she can't look at those blank walls, so she throws her head back instead and imagines the ceiling as a foggy winter sky. Weird, how she misses winter too, now. She used to bundle up in front of the fire, knitting and making stories, cursing that bite of cold lurking outside the walls, but now she wants to walk into the snow up to her thighs.

Eve hopes she'll get the chance.

He's supporting the slope of her back, and his other hand seeks timidly up her calf, the room so quiet that she can hear the hiss of his thumbnail scraping her stocking. Silent when he finds her bare thigh – but for the throb of her heart in her ears.

She feels his throat bob under her thumb. His hand stops. Retreats. But it's not a refusal. He's just cautious. Funny, too, how it makes her – her, little farm-girl, little nobody – proud to know that she makes him cautious. Eve smiles encouragingly against his temple and leads his hand up to the buttons up the back of her dress instead if her leg is so scary.

And one by one he undoes them with the attention she recognises from home, the efficient care for picking strawberries or breaking free limp leaves from stalks. Not totally knowing what she's doing either, she opens the buttons on his shirt (coloured fabric! Coloured. Not his uniform. He tries to pretend he doesn't have one but she's seen it in the slivers where the glass gives her peeks into the worlds of her handlers). Traces her fingers down the column of his throat and into the divot of his collar, where she waits, pressing down, for the right words to come.

But with her they usually don't come that easy (or that right) so she blurts, "I don't, um… I've never… You know. Of course you know."

He slips free the last button on the small of her back. She's still wearing her slip, of course, but suddenly it seems very sheer. Adam says, just as abashed, "We don't have to."

"But I know there's a time limit, for us to do this." She pokes his chest. "I'm pretty sure the, um, genetic data of gods won't be too appreciative of carnal sin in their vicinity."

There's a slow reconsidering. "We...shouldn't do this."

And just like that, he's locked up, just like the doors to her cage - rooms - the lab. His hand sets on the buttons on the small of her back, like he can hold the fabric together like that.

Doesn't he get it? Or is he...embarrassed of her? Her forwardness? She says, "I want to, Adam."

And with a voice very brittle, he says, "I know you do." He takes her hand gently. She can't see what's churning behind those closed doors. "I should take you back. This was a mistake. I - "

"Don't be worried about me. Oh, don't." She bites her lip. Everything is pressing on her, like closing walls, these days. Time and pressure and expectations and the mystery of after. She can't imagine just…going back home. Just like she can't imagine leaving him. So Eve slips off his lap and stands before him and his empty walls and floors that don't have the dignity to squeak or splinter and she sighs.

He leans forwards like he's going to get up after her, but she steps away. Lifts an eyebrow. Says, "I don't get anything I want anymore. I'm sorry, you've all been very kind to me, but the fact is that I don't. Can I just have this? To be in love with you, without their eyes, for just a night?"

He is very tense for a moment. If she didn't know any better, she'd say he looked scared. Of what? Of her? He's getting everything all wrong, isn't he?

She loves him. That's truth enough.

It takes him a long moment, his eyes fixed on her face. Then he nods. "Okay."

The words spill, "No MA."

He swallows, like taking a deep breath before the plunge. And Adam says, softly, "No MA."

"Just Adam and Eve. And Eve, she's…she's a smart girl, who never did this, but she knows lots of things. He's not going to outsmart her and he doesn't need to worry about spooking her." She wrinkles her nose. "She's from Nemu. Maybe she's a witch, who knows. But she trusts Adam. That's what we know."

Adam's fingers tighten on the duvet. "And she's beautiful."

"She's so nervous," Eve murmurs, "but she can't imagine being anywhere else."

She pulls her arms from the sleeves of her dress and steps from the heavy fabric. Underneath she has a white shift and skirt, and full white sleeves, more buttons down the front, which now strikes her as quite funny. She frees the laces of her underskirt and thinks weirdly about the cumbersome mess of skirts during…this; she used to giggle with friends about what a hassle panniers must be, like laughing about it would bury how they were secretly a little singed that they wouldn't know the hassle of panniers because they weren't rich enough to have them. She wonders if, after MA, when she has twin children at her hands, if she'll have the money and the fame to wear panniers, but that's a stupid thought and she needs to follow her own rules.

She's Eve Zvezda and she's from Nemu and she's in love with a boy.