#ratherembarrassing

YOU!

You are welcome for this gift on my birthday 😂

I THINK ABOUT THAT EPISODE EVERY DAY. it’s literally everything about the way i feel about shipping.

this ship had everything, alternate-reality married, forced to admit their feelings for plot reasons, stuck-in-a-time-loop kissing, lose their memory and still have feelings for each other, about to get married to someone else but CAN’T because of unresolved feelings

“Everyone take a deep breath in and then let it out slowly.  Let your stress out with the exhale and bring your shoulders down away from your ears.”

Alex presses her lips together as tightly as she can to keep her mouth shut, swallowing the groan at the soft breathy words of the instructor at the front of the class.  She glances out of the corner of her eye to the woman on her left, the clearly misplaced swipe-right on Tinder that Kara had encouraged her to go on a date with.  The rock climbing pictures and the text suggesting that they meet at a gym before going for coffee had piqued her interest, right up until she was handed a yoga mat and told to leave her shoes in a locker.

She’s going to kill Kara for this.  She slaps a smile onto her face as her date– Kylie, and honestly she’s not sure what she expected from someone named Kylie except for exactly what she’s getting– glances over at her with a grin and a wink, and Alex follows half a beat behind the rest of the class as they move into a triangle pose and then down into a plank.  

Alex blows a loose bit of hair out of her face, taking her irritation at the class out on the lock of hair falling over her eye.  It draws a poorly-disguised look of annoyance from Kylie, and Alex hurriedly mouths Sorry! in her direction and then stares down at the mat under her hands.  She glances back over after a moment to where Kylie’s got her eyes closed and is clearing breathing serenely to the eight-count the instructor is moving through in that still soft and still breathy and still incredibly annoying voice.

Past Kylie’s ponytail is another woman who’s also looking around the room, boredom written into the flat line she’s pressed her mouth into, and Alex raises an eyebrow.  She’s got the precise ponytail and sleek Lululemon look of everyone else in the room, but is clearly ignoring the instructor’s insistence that they all breathe together to relieve the collected stress from the outside world and is instead wrinkling her nose daintily and huffing out a not-at-all-quiet sigh of annoyance. 

Alex barely swallows a laugh, catching it behind her teeth just in time, if not enough to keep entirely quiet, and it comes out like an amused breathy snort and draws a collection of dirty looks her way.  The bored woman raises an eyebrow at her slowly and then one side of her mouth lifts into a smile and she outright winks at Alex, who very nearly loses her balance.  

The class continues to pass by, the instructor somehow maintaining her soft guidance while also clearly irritated with Alex and her new comrade in arms, both of whom go through the motions and spend half their time making faces at each other over Kylie’s ponytail and rolling their eyes.  By the time it’s ended, Alex has clearly screwed up her date– made clear by Kylie muttering something about how this probably isn’t going to work out with us and huffily rolling up her mat and abandoning Alex– but she sits lazily on her still-unrolled yoga mat with her elbows on her knees and chin propped in one hand, eyebrows raised at Kylie’s irritated stomp to the lockers and the similarly irritated glances thrown her way by the remainder of the class.

“How dare you disrupt such a sacred experience,” her partner in crime deadpans from where she’s rolling up her own mat.

Alex grins and rocks up to her feet smoothly.  "I guess I’m just not cut out for such seriousness,“ she says with a shrug.  

"How’d you end up here, then?”

Alex shrugs again and jerks her thumb over her shoulder to where Kylie is at the lockers, deep in conversation with the instructor and occasionally shooting glares Alex’s way.  "Shouldn’t have swiped right, I guess.“  She rolls her mat up sloppily and shoves it under her arm.  "What about you?”

“My assistant insisted,” she says with a smooth shrug of her own.  "She’s normally on top of things so I figured I’d give it a try.  Which is probably a better reason than a Tinder date, I have to say.”

“No argument here.”  Alex pauses and then holds one hand out.  "I’m Alex.“

"Lena.”  Her handshake is firmer than Alex expected, a concise and practiced movement.  "Bad Tinder choices notwithstanding, it was at least nice to have someone else hating this as much as I did.“

Alex clears her throat and glances down briefly at her bare feet for a moment.  "I was going to be getting coffee with said Tinder date after this, but do you want to–”

“Yes,” Lena says quickly, only to clear her throat as well and smile wryly.  "I’m much more of a coffee person than a yoga person.  It’s more relaxing and I ironically need it after this.“

"Great,” Alex says, a bit dumbfounded, because Lena is pretty and also going to go get coffee with her now on no notice.  "Let me just get my shoes and we can go.  There’s a place I know a few blocks away on–“

"The one on Broad?” Lena says.  "I love that place.  It’s right next to my office.“

"The L Corp building?” Alex says automatically, and then abruptly freezes with her shoes hanging from her hand, half out of the cubby.  "Wait, are you Lena Luthor?“

"Ah,” Lena says slowly.  "Guilty.“  She shrugs and folds her arms over her stomach carefully.  "If you don’t want to get coffee then I–”

“No!” Alex blurts out.  "I mean, yes, I do want to, no, I don’t want to.  I mean– I read your research on using interfuron-gamma against multidrug-resistant TB, it was–um, great,“ she finishes weakly, face hot.  "I mean.  Yeah, I’d still like to get coffee.  If you do.”

“You read my paper?” Lena says after a long moment.  "And understood it?“

"Well, yeah, I mean, it’s not my exact area of focus, but I still got the gist.”  Alex turns her focus to her shoes, fumbling with the laces to keep herself occupied.  

“That’s a first,” Lena says, smiling again as Alex pushes back up to her feet and clears her throat.  "That that’s what someone brings up when they find out who I am, that is.“  She tilts her head towards the door.  "Shall we, then?”

Yes, I figured it out yesterday. Still working out on how to execute but if you’re curious about its nature, you should know that my first reaction to the idea was:

OH MY GOD

ratherembarrassing replied to your post: Killing Eve episode 3 thoughts and spoilers behind...

i actually liked the really ham-fisted foreshadowing because when we set off after that i figured there was no WAY a tv show would be that blatant, and so i was completely shocked when they did it! and in hindsight it was blatantly obvious that bill had been baited into noticing and following villanelle from the second she bumped into him, but they’d completely thrown me off the scent.

OK, that’s a great point, that the foreshadowing was intentionally over-the-top...