Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The day it happened, he forgot to bring his lunch. Or rather, Yor didn’t have time to pack it and he forgot to pick up after her. They were preparing it together in the kitchen when the phone rang. She picked it up, spine straightening as she listened to the other side. Her reply was quiet, but not too quiet for him to hear: “Understood. Yes, I’ll be there shortly.”

She came back to him, slightly flustered as she always was whenever something out of their routine happened. “I’m sorry, I have to go now. They need me to come early today.”

And then, she kissed him. A quick peck that she aimed at his cheek but landed at the corner of his lips. When she leaned back, her face went through three different colors and her lips twisted between an embarrassed grimace and a smile.

It was still new, this thing between them. The kisses, the open affection. He didn’t really know what it made them, only that it felt like he was being remade with her every touch. He wondered if she felt the same.

He wanted to kiss her again.

He didn’t, though. She would be late, if he did. Instead, he twined his fingers with hers and squeezed. “I’ll see you later, then.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling sweetly, squeezing his hand one last time before leaving.

Maybe it was that. Her kiss, her hand, her smile. Her. Yor had that rare ability of eclipsing all other thoughts, quietening his mind, making him forget everything that wasn’t her for a brief, piercing moment.

Which was all to say: he forgot his lunch, that day, and that was why he left his office at lunch hour. He went to the deli across the street to get a sandwich, then took his time walking back to the hospital. It was a lovely day, bright and warm, winter thawing into spring. Already he saw some plants sprouting new leaves, some birds twittering about. Twilight was no romantic, but he could appreciate nature. He could appreciate peacetime, hard-won as it was.

He knew, of course, that it was a fragile sort of joy. He just hadn’t realized exactly how soon it would shatter.

“Doctor Forger! Oh, there you are, they’ve been calling you over the PA nonstop—please, you’re needed at the—at the ER—it’s your wife—”

He ran. He must’ve, because after, he was out of breath. Or maybe the breath was all knocked out of him. Maybe it was that thing they had once taught him at the agency, about how new couples behaved. How they mirrored each other. She wasn’t breathing. So he wasn’t, either.

She was white as the sheet pulled up her chin, eyes not quite closed. He reached forward to lower her eyelids—cool as the air around them and soft as petals on a rose—until her lashes brushed her cheeks.

He heard the ER doctor explain to him how it had happened. How she’d come, asked for him, and collapsed two steps away from the nurse station. How it had happened so fast. There was nothing we could do. And then: I’m sorry.

He was only half-listening. Information collected to be dissected and analyzed and used to fill his late nights now that she would no longer be there with him. He was now focusing on a more important task, one he knew he had to do. He pressed his fingers to where her pulse should’ve beaten. He passed his thumb over her blue lips, finding no soft exhalations. He confirmed what he had thus far been refusing to accept.

Yor—his wife—was dead.

The doctor was looking at him oddly. He realized he must’ve seemed cold. Uncaring. His wife had just died. He thought, now would be a good time to cry.

But his eyes remained dry.

They gave him her belongings. She didn’t have much with her. Her purse—with a handkerchief, wallet, and little notebook where she wrote down her shopping lists—and a lunch box.

A small piece of note was taped to the lid. Sorry, I forgot your lunch. Inside was a bruised, messy salad. All the leafy greens were wilted.

He ate it.

It wasn’t very good.

He thought, now would be a good time to cry.

They let him off work early, all pitying gazes and condolences. His eyes remained dry as he thanked them. They asked if he was okay to drive. He said yes, yes, he had to pick his daughter up from school, she had to know. They told them they were sorry, again. He was beginning to tire of sorries. He extricated himself from the conversation rather rudely, but all they said behind his back was: Poor man. Twice widowed—and she was so young—his daughter—

He stopped listening. There was no intelligence to be gleaned from their gossiping. He steered himself to the carpark then steered his car to Eden. His daughter was just exiting the building, hand-in-hand with Becky Blackbell. He called out to Anya. She brightened, ran towards the car, then stopped short with a shattered sort of expression on her face.

“Where’s Mama?” she asked, and Twilight once again was reminded of the girl’s perceptiveness. “I want Mama.”

“Get on, Anya,” he said. It came out perhaps harsher than he had intended it to be, colder, because she flinched. “Please. We’ll—we’ll talk about your Mama in a bit.”

Anya did as she was told. He fussed with her seatbelt for a long, long while. Her eyes were dripping big fat tears when he finally straightened up and told her.

He wasn’t sure what he actually said. Something along the line of, Mama isn’t going to be able to live with us anymore. Or, Something terrible just happened. Or, Yor is dead. I’m sorry.

Anya wailed. A long wordless shriek. “No!” she screamed at him. “No! No! I want Mama!”

He thought, now would be a good time to cry. But it didn’t happen, so he said some other vague thing. Something that tried to be soothing. I’m sorry. Or, It’ll be okay. Or, Would you like to see her?

He remembered how Yor had looked on that ER bed. Cold. Unmoving. It wasn’t like the storybooks with the cursed princesses. She didn’t look like she’d just been sleeping. She looked dead. She was dead.

He couldn’t remember if the parenting books he’d read ever covered the death of a parent. If it was a good idea to let his young daughter see the dead body of her mother, unadorned and unembalmed, in a morgue where dozens of other bodies lay. Maybe it would be better if they waited until Yor was all made up nicely in her casket.

Yor would know what to do. But Yor was dead.

Anya stopped crying and thumping her little fists on him. She sniffled. Wiped snot off her face with her sleeve. “I want to see Mama,” she declared, and she sounded calm. Not as calm as him, but calm enough.

“I want to see her, too.” More to the point: he had to. Family deaths were a lot of work.

Anya looked at him with something intense in her gaze, like she was trying to burn a hole through him. He breathed out, slow, careful. He started the car again.

Yuri was there at the hospital when he returned with Anya.

“A heart disease,” he said, and the way he stated it sounded like an accusation.

As ever, Twilight ignored Yuri’s tone and processed the core information. It was news to him. They hadn’t reached a diagnosis when he’d gone to fetch Anya from school. “I didn’t know,” he said.

“They’re convinced. You—you bastard, she was healthy. Strong. What did you do to her?”

In his arms, Anya stirred, turning to stare at Yuri. Twilight absently patted her hair and said, “As I understand it, some heart problems can manifest late in adulthood—”

“Oh, shut it, Forger. As if you know anything about real science.”

“This isn’t the time or place,” He said. Now would be a good time to cry, he thought, but still his eyes stayed dry. “My wife is dead.”

“You’ll pay for this,” Yuri declared. And then, he went into a long, cruel speech. Twilight couldn’t recall exactly what was said, only that he found his free hand closing into a fist even as his other hand cradled his daughter. In the other room—the morgue, it was the morgue, where they stored the dead—was Yor, and here her brother busied himself with baseless accusations. It was perhaps just how he mourned, and Loid Forger couldn’t judge as he had mourned his wife very poorly—but Twilight felt no such sympathy. All he felt was the dire need to shut Yuri up.

Anya beat him to it.

“Shut up!” she shrieked. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

“Anya,” Twilight said carefully, but Anya snapped with a ferocity he hadn’t thought she was capable of.

“Papa, tell him to shut up!”

Yuri stared at them both like they were insects, but he didn’t say anything. It didn’t seem like he could.

“Leave,” Twilight found himself saying. “You’ve upset Anya.”

“My sister—”

“My wife. I am her next of kin. You are not needed here and you have upset my daughter and made a scene.” he shot back. “Leave, Yuri. I’ll see you at the funeral.”

Yuri gave him one last contemptuous glare, then left.

Twilight’s hand remained in a fist by his side.

Anya stared and stared and stared at Yor. Finally, she said, “Mama doesn’t look hurt.”

“She was very sick, Anya. We just didn’t know.”

“Mama’s so quiet,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, she is.”

Anya sniffled. Turned her face back to the front of Loid’s shirt and began sobbing in earnest once again. He stroked her back, back and forth, back and forth. It was cold, in the morgue, but he stayed rooted to the spot. He looked at his dead wife again.

He thought, again, now would be a good time to cry.

Days passed.

At the funeral, he behaved as appropriately as he could. Dressed all in black, eulogized with all the poetry he could muster, held his crying daughter close throughout the procession. Despite all that, they still stared at him, whispering among themselves only to hush as he neared them. Now would be a good time to cry, he thought. Yor deserved a husband who cried for her. It was unseemly that he didn’t.

But he couldn’t, and now, there was nothing left for him but to go on.

When Yor woke up, it was dark and hot and suffocating. She jerked around, feeling her surroundings. A box. She was in a box. She held her breath, closing her eyes to the darkness, trying to hear something. Anything, other than the pounding in her own ears.

Nothing.

Well, then. She didn’t really have much to go on, but she’d survived worse.

She punched through the ceiling of the box. It cracked, but didn’t quite go through—there was no space for her to pull her elbow back, to gain momentum. She tried another way, hands splayed on the ceiling, then pushed.

And pushed. And pushed. The box creaked open, wet dirt pouring in. She clawed her way out. Something sharp snagged her arm, opening a stinging scrape that she ignored as she dug, soil under her nails and chest hurting and head all light and delirious, until her hand met wet rainy air and she pulled herself up, up, up.

Shopkeeper was there, waiting. He smiled at her.

“Welcome back, Thorn Princess. Are you ready for your next assignment?”

Chapter Text

Twilight leaned an elbow on Franky’s stall, his hand thumbing an unlit cigarette in his pocket. “Anything?”

“They’re all clean. Hospital security, the nurse who talked to her last, everyone at the funeral home, nothing out of place,” Franky said, placing an envelope on the counter. “A few speeding tickets, at most. You’ve seen the autopsy report?”

Twilight gave Franky a look.

“Hey, just making sure. If you’re wondering if it’s been tampered with, doesn't look like it. Medical examiner’s legit, been working there for more than fifteen years. Perfect record.”

“Cashflow?”

“Nothing weird.”

Little bits of tobacco squeezed out of the cigarette as Twilight rolled it between his fingers. He’d have to clean his pockets later. With his free hand, he took the envelope. It was useless—and he had suspected he wouldn’t find anything, anyway, having done this out of nothing but due diligence—but he’d paid for that information. “Fine. Thanks.”

“Hey!” Franky called.

Twilight stopped. Glanced back.

“Geez, get that look off your face. Just—how are you holding up?”

How he wished people would stop asking him that. “I’m fine.”

He wasn’t even lying.

The most difficult thing about living without Yor was that it wasn’t difficult at all. If he thought about it—which he didn’t like to do, but sometimes he got careless—he had lived through the deaths of so many people in his life already that she was just one more. Except her death wasn't just anything. It was the opposite of just—but then, he had also lived through the many injustices this world had to offer and he managed well enough.

It didn’t mean it was easy. Sometimes, it felt like cheating. There was no great ache in his chest, no sudden burst of tears. When a memory of her was brought to the surface it felt distant, like something out of someone else’s life. Which it had been, he supposed. Still, he thought Yor deserved a proper mourning. Someone who would cry themself to sleep over her. Someone whose voice would crack at the very mention of her. Someone who wouldn’t simply go on.

He was not that person. He filled the gaps she’d left behind without a second’s thought. He did the chores she had usually taken on and kept the house spotless, and still did the things that he was already doing: working, cooking, helping Anya with her studies. He was briefly worried for her, but even she seemed to age in the span of a few weeks. She lost nearly all of the petulance of her age and gained a certain determined look to her. Her grades were improving, she tidied after herself, and she’d even stopped asking him to tuck her in at night.

She still cried at night. That was the one thing he wished he could change, but he couldn't even remember anymore what it was like to cry.

Franky looked at him long and hard, then said, “I’ll keep an eye out if there’s anything else.”

“No need,” Twilight said, waving a hand.

“But—”

He rounded on Franky, hands gripping the edge of his stall—to loom or to hold himself up, he wasn’t sure. “What would anyone get from her death? I’ve asked myself that question in the last few weeks, and the answer is: nothing. Not a single thing. If it’s to compromise the mission, they would’ve tried to kill me or Anya. If it’s an accident originally intended for me, it’s too clean. If it’s a personal grudge—no one around her has the motive or the means to pull something like this off. And you didn’t find anything, either.”

“I’m just saying—”

“Do you honestly believe there’s a conspiracy?”

Franky deflated. “No.”

“Then stop. I buried her. It’s done.” Twilight pulled the cigarette out of his pocket. One should be fine; Anya was at school and he was outside.

Without even a second’s thought, Franky snatched it from his hand and tossed it in the trash can. “You look like you’re back at the war.”

Twilight ran a hand over his jaw. No, he hadn’t forgotten to shave this morning. “I have no idea what you mean.”

Franky didn’t even bother answering, merely raising one belligerent eyebrow.

Twilight sighed. “I’m late for work,” he said, and walked away before Franky could say anything to make his morning even worse.

Franky never brought Yor up again, but he also kept offering to babysit. He was short on money, or so he said. He could use the gig.

For someone playing both sides, he was rather bad at lying.

Twilight took the offer, though. WISE was slowly recovering its assets in Berlint, but he was still the best they got. Some nights, he was the only one they got.

Which meant Franky got paid, Anya got a tutor who knew how to explain mathematics to children, and Twilight got to have a few more hours away from their increasingly quiet house. A beneficial arrangement for everyone involved.

After a while, it even felt normal. Routine.

It chafed, that erosion of old habits to make new ones. It shouldn’t. He changed his habits with every assignment he received, with every deep cover identity. It no longer hurt him to shift from one persona to another; changing from Loid Forger, husband and father to Loid Forger, widower was barely a change at all.

And yet.

Not for the first time, he thought he should ask for a transfer. It wasn’t that work at the hospital was tiring. It always was, and he was used to it. It was only that people looked at him with pity, now. He hated those looks, but he also made no effort to convince everyone that he was fine. It was good to appear as if he was well and truly bereaved. It might even compensate for his lack of tears.

The only one who was unmoved by his performance was Nightfall, who was simply immovable by anything other than her mission—and occasionally, such as right now, his. She had come to his office today under the pretense of delivering a journal he ostensibly had asked her to bring. The moment the door closed behind her, though, she immediately went straight to business:

“You need a new wife for Operation Strix.”

The notion of taking a new wife was so repugnant, his answer was immediate: “No.”

“The parameters called for a three-person unit: you, a wife, and your child. Eden Academy values traditional family norms; they required you to interview with Yor Briar, did they not? The child will be expelled if you continue unmarried.”

Twilight watched Nightfall, trying to see the cracks in her expression. He found none. She was still as a frozen lake. He said, “They won’t expel Anya so soon after she lost her mother. It is too… inelegant, for them. As is the idea of a man remarrying within a month of his wife’s death.”

This didn’t deter her. He wondered if she’d rehearsed this argument before coming here, futile though it would be. “Maybe not now, but in a few months or a year, they’ll begin to find faults in her and blame it on her lacking upbringing. I suggest you nip the problem in the bud.”

“And I suggest you keep your personal ambitions out of my mission.”

“Our rapport is well established and our social statuses in the eyes of civilian society are equal. I am well-positioned to replace—”

“She,” Twilight cut in, “isn’t replaceable.”

“She was your second wife, Doctor Forger. She was herself a replacement.” Nightfall placed the journal in her hands carefully on his desk, lowering her mouth to his ear. “You’ve gotten soft.”

“Thank you, Miss Frost. That’ll be all.”

She didn’t bristle, exactly. She merely straightened her spine, folding her arms behind her like a soldier at ease. “If you change your mind—”

“I will not.”

She nodded. Turned on her heel. Left.

Twilight rested his forehead on his steepled hands and breathed, slow and careful. Nightfall was not wrong, merely over-eager. If Operation Strix was still ongoing in a year’s time, it might be necessary to remarry, and Nightfall would be the primary candidate for that role.

He discarded that train of thought. It was useless to focus on a possibility so far ahead in the future. For the moment, he didn’t need to remarry. Yor’s room could remain locked, untouched as ever.

He closed his eyes, scrunched them tight. Now would be a good time to cry, because Loid Forger would cry if someone suggested he replaced his dead wife. He would be furious, and offended, and teary. He was generally a tearful kind of person. A soft, sensitive soul.

Twilight wasn’t a sensitive soul. No tears came to his eyes. No great ache throbbed in his chest. All he could muster was the bile-like taste of disdain, which he swallowed.

He looked at the clock—twelve-fifteen—and realized that once again he’d forgotten his lunch.

Every afternoon, he left the hospital through the front door. Every afternoon since—since—he found his eyes slipping, wandering. He still couldn’t picture it. They said Yor had collapsed near the nurse station. Where, exactly? In front of it? Towards the corridor on the left? Had she fallen to her knee? Had she been in pain? He hoped not. He hoped it had gone swiftly and painlessly, before she could even understand that she was dying. The kindest death for the kindest woman he knew.

It was like a tumor, that growing thought. A lump in his side that he couldn’t stop poking. He hadn’t seen her die, so he had to play it over and over again in his mind, one last picture of her, one last record. He started thinking of other ways it could’ve gone, too. If anything would change had he not forgotten his lunch, had he not gone to the deli across the street. Or, if he had gone earlier or later. If he had run into her at the entrance.

She had died from a previously undetected heart condition. Whatever he had done, the condition would’ve still killed her.

And yet he thought: he could’ve been there. She could’ve seen him one last time. She wouldn’t have died with no one but strangers around her.

He pictured that, too. Her weight in his arms. Her hand in his. One last time, he thought. One last time.

It was all pure sentiment. Nightfall was right. He was getting soft.

“Oh,” Anya said when she arrived home from school. “Papa’s home.”

Had he been working too much, that she should be so surprised at his presence home? He should be more careful. Operation Strix was supposed to be his priority, after all. “Welcome home,” he eventually replied, standing up from the armchair. He should get started on dinner. “How was school?”

“Sy-on boy got a tonitrus today,” she said. “He cried.”

“Damian Desmond?” Twilight asked. From what he knew of the boy, he was more likely injuring himself trying to impress the teachers. “What happened?”

Anya sat by the coffee table, unloading her books out of her bag and onto it. “He punched a boy because he was mean to Anya.”

This was, clearly, development. But his mind only managed to snag at one thing: “Who was mean to you?”

Anya wrinkled her nose. “Are you going to punch him too, Papa?”

“I’m not going to punch a kid.” A stern conversation in the guise of a teacher, however… Or maybe he could break into Eden’s safe again and change the kid’s grade, or maybe—

“Mama said I should just smile when someone’s mean to me.”

He managed a smile. “That sounds like her.”

“Mama totally lied. It never works. Ah,” Anya said, finding a slightly crumpled envelope slipped between her books. “Mister Henderson said this is for you, Papa.”

He took it; turned it around. It was official stationery, seal-waxed with Eden Academy’s insignia.

“Mean kid said they’re kicking me out. Because I don’t have a mama anymore,” Anya said. “I don’t want a new mama.”

“I don’t, either,” Twilight said, resting a hand on his daughter’s head briefly before opening the envelope.

It was an offer. A place in the coveted Eden dormitory, if he wanted to send her there. A family death is difficult for those left behind, it said. Young Anya might benefit from a new environment, surrounded by her peers. And so on, and so forth.

“Is Anya getting the boot?” she asked.

“Where do you learn these phrases? No, they’re inviting you to live at the dormitory.”

“Dor-mee-to-ree,” she repeated slowly.

“It’s like a house, but with your friends.”

Anya made a face, one of deep thought. “And Papa?”

“Papa can see you on weekends.”

“And Bond?”

“Also on weekends.” Not that he saw her much more, these days, busy as he was with his other missions. Franky had practically moved into their couch; the man even had his own drawer and toothbrush here. “What do you think?”

Yor would hate it, he thought. Yor would clutch Anya to her chest and promise that she would never send her away. And a part of him wanted to do that. A part of him felt the shameful burn of anger at the sheer insult. The insinuation that he was an inadequate parent. The audacity to suggest that so soon after Anya had lost her mother, she would be better off away from her father.

On the other hand, maybe he had been an inadequate father. No, he knew he was, with how little he saw her. And maybe Anya would benefit from a new environment, too. Damian Desmond stayed at the very same dormitory, in the same house where Anya would be placed if such an arrangement was to happen. The boy seemed to hold Anya in some regard, if he had gone so far as to hit another child for a mean remark. Their friendship could benefit greatly from the proximity, which in turn would benefit Operation Strix. The cost would be high, but it would not be prohibitive.

Anya stared, and stared, and stared. She did that, sometimes. Stared at him as if she could see through him, and couldn’t believe what she saw.

Eventually, she said, “I wanna go.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, even as something in him ruptured and bled.

“Oui.” And, she added, “Papa, don’t be sad.”

“I’m not,” he said. The response was automatic, at this point. “What do you want for dinner?”

“Mama’s stew?” she suggested.

He agreed and cooked it exactly as Yor had used to. It didn’t taste the same.

Yor stood in a sea of dead bodies and turned to Shopkeeper, who had once again come to watch her work in person.

“Did I do well?” she asked. She had learned to ask that, instead of what should I do next? Or worse, when can I go home? It had been more than a month since Garden told her to drink that poison straight from the bottle. A seed, Shopkeeper had told her, needed to be buried so it could grow and blossom. She had obeyed. And ever since then, she had gone through assignment after assignment, proving her growth to Garden as best as she could.

They had told her she could go home, once she’d blossomed properly. She could meet her husband and have her daughter again.

She just needed to be patient.

Shopkeeper smiled, all the lines on his leathery face deepening with the motion. “Yes,” he said, which filled her with enough hope to crush with his next words: “You’re almost ready to bloom, Thorn Princess.”

“Thank you,” she said, ducking her head, biting her lip so she didn’t say anything else.

It tasted like blood. Whose, she wasn’t sure.

Chapter Text

“I want a private practice.”

Handler raised one immaculate eyebrow, but the rest of her expression remained still as a lake. “Why?”

“My presence as a skilled psychiatrist and upstanding citizen has been established. I don’t need to keep working at a public facility anymore to keep up appearances, and—the timing is right.”

“Timing,” Sherwood said slowly. “You mean your wife’s death.”

“They all think I’m mourning. No one will question my resignation; they would all attribute it to the grief. To make connections and gather information at the hospital, you already have Agent Nightfall in place. The director is partial to her, too. As for Operation Strix, my daughter is currently progressing well at school and does not need to meet me daily. A private practice with very limited appointment hours would free my time and allow me to take more assignments. It’s a better cover.”

It was a logical argument. He didn’t see the point of wasting his time on a cover no one would doubt anyway, or laboring on a mission that was at this point running well even without his interference. Every weekend, he got to hear about all the misadventures she and Becky Blackwell got into, which more than occasionally mentions Damian Desmond. She had joined the boy’s informal study group at the dorm, apparently, which accounted for her rising grades. She wouldn’t be made an imperial scholar anytime soon, but she was also no longer teetering on the brink of expulsion.

Which was all to say: the timing was right.

“You’re right,” Sherwood said, though she looked like she was spitting shards of glass.

“Thank you, Handler.”

She drummed her fingers on the table. “You’ll need an assistant,” she said, lifting her coffee to her lips.

“Not Nightfall.”

The hand that held the coffee froze. “Don’t insult me,” she said mildly. “How would it look if she quit her job at the hospital to follow you, when you were supposed to be mourning? Unless…”

“Unless?”

Handler sipped at her coffee, taking her sweet time with it. When she spoke, she did so nonchalantly. As if her words made any sense at all. She said, “It’s a common tale. Bereaved husband seeks comfort in his assistant, and eventually—”

The answer came to him as quickly as bile rising up his throat. “No.”

“It’s a diversion tactic. You understand this, of course? No one will suspect you of being an agent of the west, if they're too busy suspecting you of having an affair with her.”

He stared at his handler long and hard. She was, as ever, difficult to figure out. A woman made of steel walls and barbed wire.

She didn’t flinch at his gaze. She merely leaned back, a frown deepening between her brows. “Shit,” she said. “You really are mourning your wife.”

“Y—she was a friend,” he said. “I cared for her.”

“Is that what you think?”

“What else is there to think?”

She pinched the bridge of her nose, exhaling slowly. When she lifted her face, it was as steely as ever. “If you want a private practice, you can look for the location yourself. I’m not sparing manpower on a real estate mission. Find an inexpensive one, please, considering we’re now paying triple for your daughter’s education. I’ll vet your new assistant myself. And Twilight—”

“Yes?”

“You can’t even say her name.”

He stood. Turned around. “See you next week, Handler.”

Within the month, he managed to resign from his hospital job, bought an office space downtown, and opened his private practice. Most of his regular patients moved with him; they liked him too much and trusted him even more. He refused to take new patients, claiming to be fully booked. His assistant, a middle-aged woman who goes by Ms. Schmidt and couldn’t look less interested in the job, had become very adept at gently but firmly turning down people over the phone. He knew she was also an agent—there was no way WISE would hire a civilian for this job, and the woman was entirely too unflappable to be anything but a seasoned spy—but she never treated him as anything but the doctor who employed her. She never even brought up Yor once, and he knew how irresistible a topic his late wife was for the people around him.

He was thankful for that. It wasn’t like he had time for personal chitchats, anyway; WISE was hell-bent on making him earn his keep. He supposed he couldn’t blame them. Anya’s dormitory fees were expensive, and now he was intent on keeping his own private practice, too. His expense reports were at an all-time high.

So, he gained a new routine. Three days a week, he met with patients. The rest of the time, he was off to work. Intercepting negotiations, infiltration and reconnaissance, sabotage, assassinations—all these and more he did for his agency. He liked it. It made him feel useful, for once, unlike his charade as a psychiatrist where he listened to patients and had to avoid looking into the mirrors in their eyes, lest he saw his own ghosts reflected there.

And every so often, he got a new cover to wear for more than a couple of days. He liked those best. It was easier to breathe, in those days. Richard or Louis or Rudy had never had a child or a wife. Not real ones, not unless someone asked. None of them had ever closed their eyes and imagined the spasming figure of their wife on the hard, cold surface of hospital linoleum.

He didn’t know why it hadn’t stopped, those daily imaginings. He’d quit the hospital. He no longer walked past that spot by the nurse’s station every afternoon. He understood now that on some level, he must have been mourning Yor—though it couldn’t have been that bad, since he never even shed a single tear—but he was moving on, wasn’t he? He was no longer dwelling in the past, no longer lingering by her locked bedroom door, no longer expecting to see her in every corner of the house. He was barely home, even. Some days, he just slept on the couch where his patients usually sat to talk to him. It wasn’t for any specific aversion to the house. Just that his assignments tended to run late and the practice was closer. That was all, really.

That was all.

In those blurry days between her death and her funeral, they had asked him to choose a burial dress from her wardrobe. One morning, he woke up in his office and realized that he couldn’t remember which dress he had chosen.

It was that, of all things, that finally pushed him into his cups. He had a high alcohol tolerance, of course—all WISE agents did, having gone through the same training—but he knew it wasn’t so insurmountable an obstacle. And besides, he was free all afternoon and evening. For once, the agency had nothing for him to do.

And so, the pub.

It was a mediocre pub by any metric, notable only for the fact that he had never been there. It was neither crowded nor empty, slightly dank but not too dank, and no one there knew him. It was, therefore, perfect.

He didn’t wait. Scotch, neat, double. Nothing, so he had another double. And another double.

And he was finally feeling it. That tell-tale sensation of warmth and blurriness, creeping back to him like an old friend with nowhere left to go. He welcomed it, embraced it. Asked for a seventh—or he thought it was, because he’d had three doubles, which made six, which meant this one was the seventh—and spun on his stool when he sensed a presence right next to him.

Yuri Briar looked at him with… somehow, not as much disdain as Twilight thought he would receive.

“You look like shit,” Yuri said, flagging the bartender. He didn’t look great, either: his hair was even greasier than usual, dark bags hung under his eyes, and his general countenance was of someone who hadn’t stopped drinking for three days straight.

Twilight decided not to mention this. Instead, he took a moment to consider standing up and walking away, just like that. He pressed his foot against the floor. Just briefly, to check his balance.

He sat back down and downed his seventh drink.

He said, “Hello, Yuri.”

“Forger,” Yuri greeted back. His drink arrived; he sipped it gingerly, his gaze boring down on Twilight. “What’re you doing here?”

It occurred to Twilight—belatedly, dulled as his mind was by the alcohol—that Yuri never told the bartender what he wanted to drink. Which meant he was a regular here, which meant, surely, that Twilight had the worst luck in the world.

He asked for an eighth drink. The bartender looked at him dubiously, but poured anyway. This one, he didn’t drink in one big gulp. He sipped, careful, slow. It wasn’t top-shelf, but it was decent.

To Yuri, he said, “I’m drinking, clearly.”

“You’re drunk,” Yuri said, as if he was indicting him of some great crime. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you drunk.”

“‘M not in the habit.”

“What changed?”

That, Twilight refused to answer. Besides, a one-time departure from policy hardly counted as habit-breaking. “Why are you here?” he asked instead, because he needed to know if the entire SSS went here, too, and not just Yuri.

Yuri ignored the question. He was staring at Loid, curious yet oddly not hostile.

Loid thought, they looked alike. Their noses had the same slope, their chins had that same gentle point. And their eyes—the same startling reddish hue he had never seen on anyone else. No, not the same. Yor’s eyes were… different. Brighter, maybe, or gentler. Something.

He couldn’t remember, just as he couldn’t remember which dress he’d buried her in.

Yuri said, “I guess you didn’t do it.”

“What?”

Yuri sipped his drink again, eyes fixed on the bottom of his glass. “My sister. I looked into it. I thought at first you did it, because it’s always the husband, in these cases, isn’t it?”

“She died of a heart condition.”

“She was healthy,” Yuri ground out, slamming his glass on the countertop. His next words came out fast, scrambling—all at once like vomit. “And—listen, Forger, are you listening? I’m telling you this because you look as shit as I feel, and you should know. I have—connections, from work. That medical examiner at your morgue, he’s handled a lot of bodies. A few dozen were from an undiagnosed heart condition. One of them, from fifteen years ago, was a person of interest in an SSS investigation. Tobias Thames. Four years ago, he was sighted in Hugaria—my point is, Forger, there’s something wrong here.”

Even through the haze of his inebriation, Twilight knew that this web Yuri was weaving was tenuous at best. “Yuri,” he slurred. Since when did his speech slur? “We saw her body.”

“I know that. I know that.” Yuri tipped the rest of his drink down his throat. “She was—I know.”

Twilight grunted in reply, his mind unwillingly rifling through the information Yuri just divulged. Yor was gone. No amount of digging would bring her back to life. It shouldn’t matter so much how she died—

Except, of course, it mattered more than the world.

The problem was, Franky had found nothing. But then, Franky hadn’t gone through fifteen years’ worth of autopsy reports, choosing to cast a broader net instead. It had been due diligence on his part and Twilight’s, not a full-blown investigation.

It was also worth noting that Yuri Briar had an obsessive streak when it came to his sister. That obsessive streak could easily have pushed him into the wrong conclusions, into seeing things that weren’t there. And Yor was dead—Twilight had kissed her cold forehead before closing the casket, and he still couldn’t remember which dress she’d worn—no matter what Yuri thought.

But that her death was part of some… conspiracy? Plot?

She had worked as an office assistant at the City Hall. The Ostanian government was involved in some questionable dealings; he knew that well. It wasn’t impossible that she’d gotten tangled in something, or saw something she shouldn’t have seen. A quick unfortunate death, a silencing. He’d done missions like that himself. He knew how easy it would be, with the right people in place.

And he had told Franky to stop looking. Why had he told his informant to stop looking?

“I have to go,” he said. He reached into his wallet and withdrew a thin wad of bills, not bothering to count before slapping them on the counter.

“Yeah, walk away,” Yuri said. “Not like you can do anything about it, anyway. Good Doctor Forger, always the perfect man. Never saw a bad thing in your whole life, have you? Go on, then, live your life. Maybe get a third wife while you’re at it, see if this one stays alive.”

Later, Twilight would piece this moment together through what hazy recollections he had of it. He must’ve, at some point in the middle of Yuri’s mockery, formed a fist with his right hand. He must’ve pulled it back, then propelled it forward. He wouldn’t remember if it made contact, the first time around, but more punches followed. From him, from Yuri. They ended up rolling on the floor. Twilight would later have to replace two buttons from his shirt.

Some men jumped forward and separated them. The bartender kicked them both out.

The cool air outside brought some of his senses back. For a moment, he stood there, and Yuri too, staring at each other and the closed pub door before them.

And Twilight said, “Want a smoke?”

“Sure.”

He took out two cigarettes, one for them each, and let Yuri use the lighter first. It couldn’t exactly be said that they smoked together. It was more like they smoked on their own, in the same general space next to the pub, like the strangers they were now without Yor to acquaint them.

Twilight finished his cigarette first. The nicotine cleared his head some more, which was good. He didn’t need to be dragged into another fistfight with his dead wife’s brother, no matter how much the kid deserved a beating. He jammed the butt into his pocket ashtray, clicked its lid shut, and peeled himself from the wall.

“I have to go,” he said, for the second time that afternoon.

Yuri didn’t say a thing.

It was dark when he stopped walking. He had done so aimlessly, without thought, and now he stood over his wife’s gravestone, on the empty plot next to it.

He had bought two plots, side-by-side. It seemed the done thing, at the time. In hindsight, it felt silly. Loid Forger would in all likelihood fade from existence the moment Operation Strix was over and Agent Twilight would probably end up a nameless body in a ditch somewhere. The plot would remain empty. Yor would, even in death, remain alone.

He sat down on the grassy earth. He read the epitaph on her gravestone. It was no poetry. Beloved wife, sister, and mother. He didn’t remember deciding on it, but he barely remembered anything from that week. He thought, beloved. Had he loved her? They hadn’t had enough time to name it, and it felt wrong now to one-sidedly decide that it was or wasn’t love. The thing that had grown between them would have to remain frayed, severed, unnamed.

Now would be a good time to cry. It felt like the prelude to it, anyway. That tightness in his chest, spreading like venom up his throat. The stinging in his eyes. He was bruised and sore and tired. He could simply cry.

But he didn’t.

He supposed it couldn’t be love, if he didn’t even cry over her.

Yor watched her husband sit down next to her empty grave and bit her tongue, lest she called out to him. Garden had been so kind as to give her this evening to go watch her family from a distance, as reassurance that they were quite all right. And she thought they were, or at least Anya was. That girl seemed quite happy and content in Eden’s dormitory, and the relief Yor felt was palpable.

But now she saw her husband, and she saw that he wasn’t all right.

Loid looked terrible, all bruised and rumpled and skinny. Every so often he would heave a shuddery breath and frown, as if furious at himself for some unknowable reason, then turn to uselessly wipe at her gravestone with his shirt. She thought, get up. Go home. Have dinner. She ached to cook for him and sew his buttons back—he was missing two—and dab antiseptic on his split lip. He looked like he had been in a fight. With whom? Over what? She longed to know, longed to fold him into her embrace, longed for him.

He turned towards her, as if he could hear all her longing, and she froze in place. She was covered by the foliage, she knew. He couldn’t see her.

And she was right. He gave up after a while, instead tipping his head up and speaking something inaudible into the night air. Then, he got up and walked away, hailing a cab on the street and vanishing from her view.

Yor slumped against the tree she was leaning on. Closed her eyes. Breathed—

Shopkeeper swung at her with a scythe; she ducked, swinging her leg out, forcing him to leap several paces back.

He smiled. She had once associated that smile with a full stomach and a warm house for her and Yuri; now, her stomach lurched instead as all his leathery wrinkles shifted into something old and terrifying.

He said, “You’ve been patient, Thorn Princess.”

“Thank you, Shopkeeper.”

He moved forward with the grace of a curling vine, one hand curved over her shoulder, cold. “We have one last customer for you, and then you can go home to your family. How does that sound?”

Hope and joy and relief filled her chest so full, tears rose to her eyes. “Yes, Shopkeeper,” she said, eager. “I will do my best.”

Chapter Text

The day Yor died, she forgot to pack her husband’s lunch. Or rather, she didn’t have time to finish packing it, and Loid must’ve been too busy with everything else to pick up after her. They were in the kitchen when the phone rang, preparing it together. She picked it up, a cold tingle of anticipation dripping down her spine as Shopkeeper’s voice came from the other side.

He said, “You are needed urgently, Thorn Princess. Go now, straight to Garden; your superiors at the City Hall have been notified.”

This was unusual. She hadn’t been summoned like this for years. Being one of Garden’s trusted assassins meant a more lenient timeline, enough time for her to prepare herself or sort her business before leaving for her assignment.

Which meant it had to be something important, and so Yor said, without a second’s thought, “Understood. Yes, I’ll be there shortly.”

“I’ll be waiting,” Shopkeeper said, then hung up.

She gave herself a breath, then two. Something jittered under her skin, something she couldn’t name, but she made her way back to Loid, explaining the situation. He understood—he always did understand her best—and before she could stop herself, she found herself on her tiptoes, kissing him goodbye. She meant it to land on his cheek, but he turned his face at the last second and her lips met with the corner of his mouth. Already, she felt heat rising to her cheeks and her face contorting in contrition, but she forced herself to smile at him as if nothing was wrong.

He smiled back. A slight lift to the corner of his lips, that spot she’d just kissed, and she thought—

No, she could hardly think. But she felt. A swelling in her chest, a sense of revelation. Oh, she thought, in the absence of a coherent mind. Oh.

The moment stretched. There was a tinge of hesitation in her husband’s expression as he glanced down at her lips and then up again. But he didn’t comment on their miscalculated kiss, or fluster, or show any other signs of unease. He didn’t kiss her again, either, which she would come to regret. He simply twined his fingers with hers, squeezing gently.

“I’ll see you later, then,” Loid said.

“Yes,” Yor replied.

She didn’t know, then.

She couldn’t have.

Shopkeeper took her hand in his dirt-covered one and pressed a small, brown glass bottle into her palm. “Drink this,” he said. His voice was, as always, calm.

She didn’t understand why she had to come in early just for this, but she unstoppered the bottle anyway. “What is this?” she asked, peering into the clear liquid inside.

“Poison,” Shopkeeper said simply.

In hindsight, she should’ve asked more questions. Twice a week, Garden would give her a cocktail of poisons for her to maintain her resistance to them—just like medicine, if the medicine could otherwise kill grown men twice her size with half the dose—but today was not one of those scheduled days. The bottle, too, was unusual; they usually gave her a nice crystal glass for it. And there was just that edge in Shopkeeper’s voice today, that glimpse of something steely and implacable that reminded Yor a little too much of the day she had made her first kill so many years ago.

But she hadn’t died yet, and the years she had lived, she had lived because Garden allowed her to.

And so, she drank the poison. Straight down, unflinching. The bottle was so small, it was barely a gulp. One tiny swallow, bitter on her tongue and ice-cold down her throat. For a moment, she anticipated something to happen. A spasming, a cough of blood.

But she remained standing still, unaffected. She blinked, frowning, trying to figure out if anything in her body had changed.

Nothing—that she could feel, anyway.

Shopkeeper extended his hand palm-up. Yor returned the empty bottle to him, feeling as if she had misunderstood an important lesson.

“Thorn Princess,” Shopkeeper said. “Is there anything you are keeping from Garden?”

“What?” Yor blinked, once, twice. She didn’t know how to answer that question. She didn’t tell Garden everything, of course, but she didn’t think it was relevant to Garden, what Anya’s grades were or what dishes Loid usually cooked for dinners. “Is there anything you’d like to know, Shopkeeper?”

Shopkeeper watched her closely, carefully. His dark gaze pinned her in place, the gaze of the stern instructor he had once been to her young self. He had been kinder with her, ever since she’d proven herself, but there were days—such as today—when she wondered if she was to be put through another week of survival training.

“Not in particular,” Shopkeeper said. “Go on, then. It’s almost time for your shift, yes?”

She thought, that was that. She went home to change—she’d run from home to Garden and sweated through her clothes—and found Loid’s lunchbox still open on the kitchen counter. So she took it when she left to work, and right at lunchtime she made her way to Berlint General, and her blood was thrumming with excitement as she declared herself Doctor Forger’s wife and asked the nurse at the desk where his office was.

And then—

It seized her suddenly, sharply—an ice spear to her chest. She convulsed, her whole body shaking; Loid’s lunchbox fell from her hand and she bent down to retrieve it, but her legs gave and she was on the floor, and she couldn’t breathe, and it was so cold—

And she woke up in a box, and she dug her way out, and later, in Garden, Shopkeeper cupped her soiled chin with his soiled hand and looked into her eyes.

“Do you know why you’re here?”

She shook her head.

“A seed needs to be buried before it can blossom.”

She still didn’t understand. She had never had a green thumb; all her attempts to farm in her younger days had failed, and she was resigned to the fact that her hands were better at wrenching life out of its soil than nurturing it. All the seeds she’d buried had never once blossomed.

“I do apologize for not warning you beforehand,” he said. “But it would defeat the point of this. To keep the world a beautiful place, you see, you must commit. Are you committed, Thorn Princess?”

Yor straightened her spine. “Yes.” It was no question at all. She did her work to protect the world—and with it, her family. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”

“Then, I must apologize once more. Because you see, until the work is finished, you cannot go home.”

She remembered the box. No, the coffin. The grave. She said, “They think I’m dead.”

Shopkeeper inclined his head. “It was necessary.”

She clenched her fists, then unclenched them. Again and again. Her family thought she was dead. How cruel, for Anya to lose yet another mother. For Loid to lose yet another wife. He might not have loved Yor like he had loved his first wife, but they had been companions and recently, something else. Something new Yor didn’t know what to call.

And Yuri—oh, why hadn’t she made time to meet up with her brother more often? And now she couldn’t anymore.

Couldn’t she? Shopkeeper said, until the work is finished. “But I can—go home, after?”

Something flashed in Shopkeeper’s eyes, vanishing in a split-second. He inclined his head, smiling affably. “It will take a while, but yes. You may have your family again.”

And that was enough for her.

The following months crawled forward like a half-dead thing. Garden had provided her a small house at the edge of the city; every day, they delivered groceries to her doorstep, leaving instructions scribbled at the bottom of the paper bag. Every day, she did her assignments without complaint, even when they stretched to two days, and then three, and sometimes even a week. Sometimes, they took her out of the country, smuggled in a box among many boxes in a truck, and she did her work on foreign land, not understanding a word of her opponents’ screams.

She hated those assignments the worst. It had happened twice, now, and both times, she wished she was more worldly. She wished she knew other languages. It felt wrong, that the last words of her targets all dissolved into nonsense sounds in her mind. Dying alone was a cruel thing; at the very least, she should’ve been able to listen to them in their final moments. One last humane act before she did what she had to do for her country.

It was that, that she repeated in her mind again and again: for the country. For Ostania. For its people. For her family. She had a purpose. This was not senseless.

The Hugarian man she was to kill two months into her death knew a handful of words in her language. He asked, “Why? Please, why?”

And she didn’t know what to say.

She realized that Garden had stopped briefing her about her targets. She usually knew of the crime they had committed, their treachery to the nation. But this man, she knew only that he was a threat and he had to die—nothing else.

“Please,” the man said again. “I have a family.”

“So do I,” she said.

And she killed him, because she had to. For her family. For her family. For her family.

It was a test. Shopkeeper didn’t call it that, but even she understood that much. There was distrust as he watched her work, now. As if she could turn on them at any time. It made no sense. Had she not proven herself over the years? She would die for Garden, for her country. She had died for Garden.

She didn’t know what had changed—until they gave her her final assignment.

It was early morning, the day after she had gone to her own grave to watch her husband. There were birds twittering in the beautiful garden, and on the table between them lay a breakfast spread, toast and honey and jam and warm coffee. In the middle of all that, a folder, Shopkeeper’s hand pressed atop it forbiddingly.

“The West had sent a spy to infiltrate our beautiful nation,” Shopkeeper said. “He has acted against our interests, killed a number of our agents, and as of recently has increased his activity to thwart our country. It is a mark of great honor and even greater trust that you are chosen for this. Do you understand?”

Yor nodded, her heart in her throat. She was so close. So close to the end, so close to home.

Shopkeeper lifted his hand from the file.

Yor took it. Flipped it open.

All the warmth of the morning sunlight drained out of her. Her hand trembled. “I see,” she said, and she did. The shape of the test that she had been put through. The question of her loyalty.

Her husband’s face, staring back at her from the many photographs in that folder. He almost didn’t look like himself, face shuttered off, a gun in his hand—but it was him.

And Garden—

They wanted to see if she had known all along. If she had been part of his operation. If she had defected to the enemy’s side.

“Do you have any questions?” Shopkeeper asked. He was slowly pouring honey onto his toast, unconcerned.

“I didn’t know.” It wasn’t a question, but it was all she could say.

A light chuckle. “We ascertained as much in the past few months. He seems to have pulled the wool over your eyes as much as anyone else. A skilled liar. Did you know that his daughter wasn’t his at all?”

“No.”

Shopkeeper watched her closely, then nodded. “No harm needs to come to her. She’s young. We may properly educate her yet.” He cut into his toast delicately, lifting a piece to his mouth before stopping short. “You may go home to your husband now.”

Yor couldn’t talk. Couldn’t think. She took the folder off the table, pressed it close to her chest, and stood.

And with a bow, she turned on her heel and walked away.

Director McMahon waited for her by the gate. “I’ll drive you,” he said plainly. It was neither an order nor an offer. Just a statement of fact.

She climbed into the car next to him, aiming her gaze out the window, looking at nothing in particular. The director didn’t offer any conversation. Yor didn’t seek any. Twenty minutes or so passed until he pulled over in front of her apartment, and for a moment she looked up at the building, that balcony where she and Loid had once drunk wine together and slow-danced under the moon..

There was probably no one there, she thought. Her daughter was at the dormitory, Loid was busy with his work, and their dog was now under the care of Loid’s friend. Gutted so, could it even be called a home anymore?

“He’ll be there,” McMahon said, as if reading her mind. “It has been arranged.”

“I—I see.”

Her superior looked at her with an inscrutable expression. He pushed his glasses up and looked at her expectantly. “Remember yourself,” he said. “And do what you have to do.”

She didn’t know what that meant, but it felt bracing, anyway. Enough for her to open the car door and lift her leaden feet one by one, off the car, until she was standing by the curb. She left Loid’s file in the car. She didn’t need it, for what was to come.

One breath, then another, and finally, Yor Forger came home.

The medical examiner who had claimed that Yor had passed from a heart condition was dead. Twilight hadn’t killed him, but he had found the body when he’d come to Berlint General in disguise. That, more than anything else, had been confirmation that Yuri had been onto something. Something about Yor’s death didn’t fit, didn’t feel right, and Twilight felt embarrassed that he had overlooked it for so long. That his judgment had been so clouded by what he could understand now as grief.

And the cloud hung, even now, but his mind was clearer still now that he knew it for what it was. So he mourned his wife. That was what husbands did, didn’t it? He carried the grief as he investigated her death, as he went through all the people involved in the funeral house. As he stole the hospital morgue’s archives, which for some reason hadn’t been stolen or destroyed by whoever had killed the medical examiner.

He was rifling through the files at his private practice, noting down every familiar name, every questionable death, when the phone rang. His assistant picked it up, her voice lilting up in a surprised question as she responded to the caller. Not long after, she appeared at his door.

“Someone broke into your house, Doctor.”

It could be bait, Twilight realized. A second realization: he didn’t care.

If it meant he could catch a glimpse of those who had had a hand in Yor’s death, if it meant he could grasp at yet another straw, if it meant he could just fight his way through the bubbling, boiling fury in his chest—because how dare they take her, the best woman in this entire wretched world—he didn’t care at all if he was walking into a trap.

And so, he went home. Alone, because he didn’t want anyone to see him in his haunted house. Because he wanted the fight—should there be one—to be something of a challenge, at the very least.

But the house was empty when Twilight arrived. The front door had been closed shut, though unlocked. The house, pristine except for something a little off, something like the smell of dust in the sun—

Yor’s bedroom door was ajar. He rushed there, invisible hands choking him with every step, as if—as if—

But her room, too, was empty. Empty and yet. A shipwreck of a room, dashed wooden furniture and ripped sheets and bedding, her clothes all strewn about, the mirror smashed into pieces, and—inexplicably—an assortment of blades littering the floor. He knelt down, picking up a long, slender spike of brass. He looked at it. Turned it in his hands. It was too slim for his hands, but in a smaller, perhaps woman’s hand—perhaps Yor’s—

“Agent Twilight,” said a voice behind him. A familiar, melodic voice. A voice he hadn’t heard for so very long. A voice that couldn’t be hers, because she didn’t know that name. A fleeting thought crossed his mind: had he begun hallucinating, now?

He turned around.

Yor stood over him, and she was real. He would never have imagined her like this. She was too thin, too pallid, too sad—and so, he knew she was real.

“Yor,” he breathed. His voice trembled. No, his whole body trembled, shaking and shivering in his disbelief. Something rose and swelled in his chest, making it difficult to breathe. His eyes grew hot; his inhalation and exhalation came in staccatos. All of a sudden, it crashed into him, a swelling tide of sorrow so powerful that he rocked forward, bowed by the force of it, and—after so very long—

He cried.

Chapter Text

Twilight had forgotten what it was like to truly cry. The physicality of it, how it was both suffocating and freeing, how his whole body heaved with every sob, how messy it was. He hated mess. He hated being the slightest bit discomposed. All around him was the stultifying press of all the sorrow he had refused to feel for months, crushing him under its weight.

But before him stood his wife, and she was alive, and he was so unbelievably, incandescently happy.

“Yor,” he said again. “Yor, Yor, Yor.” He let the name drip from his lips. He’d forgotten the shape of it on his tongue, how sweet it tasted. He rolled the sound like candy. He adored her name; he didn’t think he’d ever told her that.

She crouched down until they were face-to-face. Her countenance was drawn and pallid, devoid of the warmth that usually radiated out of her. And yet—there was still something there, a flicker of tender concern in the tick of her eyebrow. She was forcibly schooling her expression, he could tell.

“What’s wrong, darling?” he asked, because he could, now. Because she was here.

She flinched. At the endearment or the question, he didn’t know. “Don’t call me that,” she said, a slight tremor in her voice.

The endearment, then.

“Alright,” he said. Later, he would wonder how he could be so very calm in the face of his resurrected wife. At the moment, however, he felt like—like emerging to the surface after a long, deep dive into the ocean, light-headed, drunk on air and hungry for sunlight. His mind was quiet; there was only her, the fullness of her presence. “Talk to me. What’s wrong?”

She frowned. “Aren’t you going to ask me how I’m alive?”

It hadn’t occurred to him, until she asked. He thought about it for a while, and he realized why. It was no great riddle. The answer was obvious, glaring—he barely had to think about it. “You never died,” he said simply. “So the question is: how did you fake it?”

She looked away, biting her lip. He wanted to reach forward and use his thumb to ease it from between her teeth, but he didn’t. Instead, he waited, wiping the tears off his face as he did so.

He had cried. For her, over her, because of her. He hadn’t cried real tears since the war.

He realized: he loved her.

He swallowed down that truth and waited some more.

When Yor finally spoke, she still didn’t meet his eyes. “They gave me a—poison. A drug, I suppose. I don’t remember anything after I collapsed at the hospital, and when I woke up I was already underground.”

“They?” he asked. He picked up the long, brass spike from where he’d dropped it. Offered it to her, handle-first.

Her hand closed around the handle and it fit perfectly. A final stroke of paint to finish the painting that was her.

“Garden,” she said. She spun the spike in her hand; he watched the stretch of skin of her wrist, the way sunlight turned it translucent.

He wanted to touch her so. He didn’t. He thought instead of that name, Garden, and how woefully little he knew of that shadowy organization. How he’d thought it was no more than a myth. And now one of its agents stood before him. His wife. Dead, then not. She had arrived after him, which meant it hadn’t been her who broke into this room. It must’ve been Garden’s other agents, making sure he would be home for her, scattering her weapons on the floor so he would know what she truly was.

He remembered the cold rain of her voice when she called him: Agent Twilight. She knew that Loid Forger was fake, then. A mere facade. Garden had made sure she knew that.

The weapon in her hand glinted; he understood, then.

Leaning forward, he rested his throat lightly on the tip of the spike. “Are you here to kill me?”

“I’m here…” she began, then paused. The point of her weapon pushed into his skin, stopping shy of truly wounding him. “I am here because Garden sent me to kill you.”

He didn’t miss the way she worded that statement, the slow carefulness of her voice. “And will you?”

Her face hardened. She was so very easy to read, his wife. Even now he could see the hesitation in the lines of her shoulder, the way her hand trembled around her weapon. She hadn’t made up her mind. He wondered why.

Yor asked, “Was I your mission?”

“No,” he said, quick and not entirely truthful. He tried again. “I was to marry, yes. But they didn’t specify who I had to marry.”

“Why me, then?”

He looked at her—she’s alive, he thought again, she’s alive!—and found the truth spilling out of him easily, hopelessly. “That day, at the tailor, you walked past me and I didn’t even know you were there until you spoke. No one else does that.” In hindsight, he should’ve known. Should’ve suspected something. But he hadn’t been lying, when she’d asked him why he had stared. She was very beautiful. “And Anya seemed to like you instantly.”

“Anya—”

“She was like you, but she was also the mission. I was to ensure her enrollment at Eden in order to make contact with another student’s parent.” It was treason to tell her even this much, but he was a dead man either way.

Her mouth twisted, an unhappy, miserable expression. Her free hand fisted around his shirt, tugging him closer; the sharp tip of her weapon pressed deeper into his skin, nicking him. “Do you love her?”

“Yes.” I love you, too, he nearly said.

“Don’t lie.”

“I’m not lying.” A hot, wet trickle rolled down his neck, soaking the collar of his shirt, smelling like rust. “I love her. I didn’t mean to, but I do. And you do, too.”

“You used us.”

“Yes.” He might’ve tried his best to do right by them, but it didn’t change the fact that he had also used them. Yor had lied, too—he could see that now—but she hadn’t deceived him when it came to the reason she had married him. As for her faked death, he had a feeling her people hadn’t given her a choice whatsoever on the matter.

She still hadn’t made up her mind, but he had. It felt like loosing an arrow. “Yor?” he said gently, quietly. As if soothing a wounded animal. “You should kill me.”

Her grip on the weapon faltered, scraping a stinging line down his skin. “I—”

“Do it, darling.” He closed his hand around hers, around the cold metal in her fist. She was trembling. He squeezed—her hand was warm against his clammy palm. His body knew the score: she lived and he was to die. “The people you’re with, they wouldn’t take kindly if you spared me. Just—tell Anya I left. Make her hate me like you already do, so she won’t be too sad when I’m gone.”

At this, she balked; her hand jerked away, but he held her tight. Held her in place, spike poised to strike. She looked at her with wide, furious eyes. “I don't hate you,” she said, tugging her hand away one more time.

He let go. “What?”

“I don’t hate you,” Yor repeated, voice trembling.

He didn’t understand. Couldn’t understand. “You should, I—I used you, you said it yourself.”

“I know.” She slumped back, palms pressed against her eyes. One breath, two, then she lowered her hands and looked him straight in the eye. “I know I should, but I don’t.”

“Yor—”

“I think—I think I’m in love with you. Yes, that must be it,” she said with finality. With such firm certainty. “I love you, Loid—Twilight—whatever your name is, I love you.”

He had so many things he wanted to say. Kill me anyway or don’t, I don’t deserve your love or I love you too, Yor, I love you, I love you, I love you. He opened his mouth, not knowing which words would come out. His throat was dry. It was quiet everywhere; in this world, at this time, nothing and no one else existed but Yor and him and her confession in the air between them.

He wetted his lips. Her gaze flickered down to his mouth before returning to his eyes; a quick thing, but he caught it, and it filled him with such hunger he felt himself surging forward, palms resting on the floor—a shard of something ripped his skin but he barely felt it—and she was there, wide-eyed, frozen, her lips parted in a little o and he wanted—he wanted—

A knock on the front door. “Doctor Forger?” a cold, feminine voice called out.

He knew that voice.

Hide, he mouthed to Yor. Then, he went to get the door.

Nightfall stood at the entrance of his home, impassive as ever. Twilight knew with one glance that she would stand there until he let her in, and—despite everything—he could picture his nosy neighbors, their gossipy whispers. How he hated those wagging tongues.

And so, without a word, he stepped aside. Equally silent, she walked in.

As soon as he closed the door, she said, quietly but plainly, “You’re bleeding.”

“Ah.” He touched the wound on his neck. The drip of blood. “A bug bite. I scratched it a little too hard.” And then, he noticed the shard of glass embedded in the palm of the hand he’d raised. That wound, he didn’t bother explaining. He simply plucked the glass shard out and tossed it in the bin.

She watched him, her expression cool and inscrutable. “I heard your house got broken into.”

“A prank, nothing more. Nothing of value was taken. If that’s all—”

“Are they still here?”

That last part, she merely mouthed at him. He shook his head. She tilted hers, unblinking; it lent her the look of an owl.

And then, he walked past him.

“Hey—” he called out, reaching for her. She shrugged him off and continued walking down the corridor, stopping only at Yor’s ajar door.

For a long while, they were both silent as Nightfall took in the scene. The wrecked furniture, the blades on the floor. Yor wasn’t there—or at least, she was nowhere in plain view, for which he was grateful. Not a single whiff of her presence was left behind; if he didn’t know her better, he would’ve thought she had run away.

But Yor wasn’t a runner. Not when it mattered.

Nightfall crouched, picking up the very weapon that had pricked his skin. She inspected its red point, testing it with her own fingertip. “The bug, I assume.”

He side-stepped past her, snatching Yor’s needle from her hand. “This is not your concern.”

“The residence of our top agent has been compromised, and he has been wounded in the interim.” She stood, brushing dust off her knees. “I believe that makes it the agency’s concern.”

“Nightfall—”

“This was Yor Briar’s room, yes? She seems to own a considerable amount of weaponry, for a civilian woman. Unless they’re not hers?” Her eyes flitted from him, to the floor, and back to him. “Where is she now?”

It wouldn’t be easy, Twilight thought, to kill Nightfall. He had trained her himself. They knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses in combat; in fact, they complemented each other near-perfectly, that way, which would make them each other’s most dangerous opponents.

It would be a difficult fight. And it would be wrong. Nightfall was a comrade-in-arms. It would make him a traitor.

But his hand tightened around the too-slim needle anyway.

Nightfall noticed it. Of course she did. “She is here, isn’t she?”

“She is dead,” he said. The lie came easily, smoothly. It had been true, until today. Perhaps that was why. Tears came to his eyes, again; he averted his gaze. Nightfall had no right to see. It was a mere echo of a memory, anyway. Yor was alive, and she was here. “I buried her.”

Her scrutiny weighed heavily on him, but he’d endured worse. He breathed. Slow. Careful. He needed to be careful.

“I don’t know why they’d broken into this room,” he said. “And I don’t know why all these weapons are here. But you are not my superior. When I submit my incident report, it would be to Handler. Not you.”

“She is well aware that I am here as your backup. What, exactly, do you expect me to report to her?”

He nearly laughed in her face. What would it matter, what Nightfall said to WISE? “Anything that you see fit. It is your report, after all.”

At that, something cracked in the glacier of her expression. It was nearly imperceptible, even to him, and what peeked through that fissure was something unreadable. Something—no, not angry, nor disappointed. Something else. “Sir,” she spat out. “I must ask you to reconsider.”

He realized, then: she was desperate. She had always been so loyal to the nation, to the mission. He had no doubt she saw this as a betrayal.

But he had meant it when he’d told her to write anything she pleased in her report. Agent Twilight no longer existed as of today; nothing she did would change that.

“Please leave, Agent Nightfall. As you can see, I have some cleaning up to do.”

She took a step forward, deeper into the room. He took another step, standing in her way.

Her hand twitched. Just once, before she forced it to go still again. Before she said, accusingly, “You love her.”

“I do.”

“You would do this for her?”

He didn’t know what she referred to. Death? Treason? But his answer was, still: “I would.”

Nightfall took a step back, then turned on her heel. “Crime is on the rise in this city,” she said. Her voice was colder and more distant than usual. “And you’re hardly ever home. An easy target for a common robber.”

“I’ll try to be more careful,” he said as he walked her to the door.

“See to it that you are,” she said. “Well then. Goodbye, Doctor Forger.”

“Goodbye, Miss Frost.”

When he closed the door, Yor was there in the kitchen, holding their first aid kit. The morning sunlight limned her gold, lit her eyes like ember. Between her brow, as if someone had pressed their fingernail there, was a small, worried furrow. The sight was so achingly familiar—Anya had had her fair share of scraped knees, and that first aid kit had seen to them—and for a moment, he forgot to breathe.

“I’ll patch you up,” she said.

He waved a dismissive hand at her. “It’s nothing. It’s already stopped bleeding, it’ll heal on its own.”

“Loid—” she began, then caught herself. “No, sorry, that’s not your name—”

“Loid’s fine for now,” he replied, smiling despite himself.

“Well then. Loid.” She pursed her lips, as if unsure if she liked that name on him, but then continued, “It might get infected.”

He really didn’t think it would, but he couldn’t refuse her. Not anymore. Perhaps not ever. “Well. If you insist.”

They sat down at the dining table, chairs turned face-to-face. She hesitated, then said, “Your hand, please,” and he obligingly laid his arm out on the table, allowing her to get to work.

As she cleaned his wound, he cataloged the differences between the Yor he’d known and the Yor now before him. Her face was sharper, her cheeks less rounded. There was a tiredness in her eyes that he had never seen before. An on the tip of her ear—

“What is this?” he asked, tucking a strand of hair away, fingertips brushing the scar there. A thin, dark line at the edge, around the rounded shell.

“Oh,” she said, leaning back and away from his reach. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s new.”

“After I… died, I guess, I was sent on a lot of assignments. I don’t remember which one this was from, but I think it was around the second month.”

He lowered his hand. “I see,” he said. It was not the right time to ask her what these assignments entailed, though he could guess, and the thought branded him from the inside. He had no right to be angry; after all, wasn’t he the same? Had he not had his own share of assignments? And yet he felt it, the creeping hot vines of fury. It was never sudden, with him. He always could tell when it began. He simply couldn’t stop it. And this anger, it was not directed at her.

It was at himself.

Garden knew who he was. Was that why they had killed her? It was an elegant solution, if so. It forced their separation. Isolated her from him. A good tool to check where her allegiance lied and how much he had relied on her. And in the end, they sent her to kill him, to seal that allegiance in place.

But she hadn’t killed him. Instead, she was patching him up for inconsequential wounds.

As if all her wounds in the past months hadn’t been his fault all along. For using her and lying to her and marrying her.

He traced the scar again, burying his fingers in her hair, cupping the nape of her neck. She was so warm. Sun-warm, alive-warm. “Are there others?”

She ducked her head, leaning away from him. “Some. It’s okay, really.” She reached for a bandage and peeled the backing before sticking it on his palm. “Can you lean forward a little?”

He did, and this time she cleaned the wound on his neck. Like this, she was so close he could simply tip himself forward and kiss the crown of her head. He could fold her into his embrace. He could hold on and never let her go again. But he didn’t.

He didn’t deserve to.

“Won’t you kill me, Yor?” he asked, though he knew it was futile.

Yor didn’t answer, not for a long time. She wiped the cut on his neck with antiseptic; cleaned up the trickle of blood down his collar. She carefully put a bandage over the wound. She tidied up the first-aid kit and threw away the dirtied antiseptic wipes. She did all of that without meeting his gaze or showing any sort of acknowledgment to his plea.

But then she sat back down in front of him, and she straightened her spine, and she looked him straight in the eye. When she spoke, her voice was a small, uncertain thing—but her gaze didn’t waver.

“What you said earlier, to Fiona… That you—that you love me.” Her hands clenched in her lap, then loosened. There were scars there, too; he wanted to count them with his lips. “Did you mean it?”

“Darling,” he said, a little astonished laugh escaping him. “I am begging to die for you. Of course I meant it.”

Her expression hardened, brows gathering in the middle of her forehead, mouth twisting unhappily. “Then, if you love me, never ask me to kill you again.”

She meant it. Every word. It felt—not quite like absolution, but something close. The beginning of forgiveness. “Alright,” he said.

She nodded. “Good. I—I love you too much, I can’t—you can’t ask me that.”

“I won’t. I promise. But Garden will not be pleased.”

“Well, I’m not pleased with them,” she said, sniffing. So brave, his wife. So strong. But not so strong she became too foolish to be scared. On her lap, her hands trembled; he took them, folded them in his own. They exchanged a smile, but then her expression dimmed. Quietly, she said, “We’ll have to run, don’t we?”

He considered the odds. They could win, he supposed, should they wage war against Garden. If they had sent Yor to kill him, then she had to be good, perhaps the best they had just like how he was the best WISE had. Together, they would be quite formidable.

Their odds were slim, but not nil.

But he knew so little of Garden. He didn’t know how far their reach went, how many they counted as their number. He didn’t know if they were, as Franky had said once, part of the shadow government—or if the shadow government was at all real. He didn’t know if Yor would know the answer to any of those questions, should he ask her.

And then, he thought of the power vacuum, the aftershocks of felling a giant, the destabilization of an already fragile peace. He thought of the trail of blood they would leave in their wake. He thought of the considerable probability of one or both of them dying in the process.

He thought of Anya.

He said, “Pack your things. We leave today.”

Yor nodded, standing up, but he didn’t let go of her hands. Instead, he tugged her closer, and closer still, until he could just lean up and touch his lips to hers.

“I missed you,” he said, and only now did he let her hands go—but this time she clung onto him, surging forward, opening her mouth against his and oh, he remembered what it was like to have her, to hold her in his arms and taste her on his tongue and live. For he knew now: it had been no life, those months he’d trudged along without her. He had buried himself in that empty plot next to her grave and he hadn’t even known it. “I missed you so much, Yor.”

“I missed you too,” she said. Her face was wet. No, both their faces were. “I’m sorry it took me this long to come home.”

“Got held up at work?” he asked, which won him a little half-laugh, half-hiccup.

“Yes,” she answered, wiping her eyes. “You understand, I’m sure.”

“I do,” he said, laughing, his heart lighter than he’d ever remembered it to be.

There was much to do: pack their things, get their daughter, get their dog because their daughter would hate it if they didn’t bring their dog, say their goodbyes to what few people they could trust with the goodbyes, leave the country in the cover of darkness—

But Yor was back home, and so was he.

Chapter Text

It was Yor who came up with the idea of asking for her brother’s help. Yuri worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; surely he could do something for them! Loid had grimaced at that bold claim—and it was a bold claim, as she didn’t really know what it was that Yuri did at the ministry—but acquiesced.

“He deserves to know you’re alive, at least. And you deserve to say a proper goodbye to him before we leave,” Loid said, though he still didn’t seem keen on the idea. “Though I would not tell him that you’re married to a spy and planning to escape the country with him.”

“No, of course not, Loid! It’s—I’ll just tell him the part with Garden, I think. He should know that much.”

“Thank you,” he replied simply, a small relieved smile on his lips. “He already hates me as it is.”

Yor tilted her head. She knew Yuri disliked Loid, on some level, but she didn’t know it was so bad. “Did something happen with Yuri?”

Loid didn’t immediately answer. He looked away, rubbing the back of his neck. Eventually, he said, “We ran into each other, a few days ago. He told me he was looking into your death and found some things that didn’t fit. And then, he… said a few other things. I was drunk. We sort of got into a fight.”

She remembered watching Loid at her grave. He had been disheveled. Bruised. Even now, she could see a ghost of something purple on the line of his jaw. It was thin, but now that she noticed it, she couldn’t stop looking at it.

Yuri had been similarly bruised, too, that day. She simply hadn’t made the connection.

“Oh, Loid.”

He lifted his hands. “I’m not proud of it, either. And…” he began, then shook his head. “No. It’s not my secret to tell.”

Yor frowned, but didn’t ask further. Instead, she took her husband’s hand and kissed his knuckles. “Alright,” she said. “Shall we get ready, then?”

An hour later found them at a bistro near the central government compound. Yor, who was supposed to be dead, wore a yellow-blond wig and a set of Loid’s clothes, which hid her figure well enough. Loid seemed pleased, smiling at her every so often. He himself was undisguised, though he tipped his hat low on the way here.

When Yuri arrived at their table, he was in a Secret Police uniform.

“Forger,” he said, looking straight at Loid and completely ignoring Yor. “This better be important.”

“I wouldn’t have called you otherwise,” Loid said, clearly annoyed. He glanced at Yor, a plea for help in his eyes.

Yor found it very difficult to speak, at the moment. She kept staring at Yuri, at his uniform, at his young, young face. Not my secret to tell, Loid had said earlier. Without looking away, she grabbed the glass of water on her side of the table and drained it.

Yuri had finally noticed her, at this point; his eyes widened in disbelief. “SIS—” he started to squeal, but a loud thump under the table turned his voice into a quiet whimper. From across her, Loid innocently tilted his head.

“Sit down, Yuri,” Yor said, gesturing at the empty chair on the side. “Please.”

Yuri sat down, then leaned close to her to grip her hand. “You’re alive?” he said, his voice thankfully low.

“You’re with the Secret Police?” Yor shot back, because how—since when—why? Had she not worked very hard so that Yuri could have a good life and not expose himself to danger like this?

Loid stood from his chair. “You two have some catching up to do,” he said tactfully. He then took two steps towards her and dropped a kiss on top of her head. “I’ll be outside, alright?”

He left, ignoring Yuri’s obvious glare. Yor thought of asking her brother about it—maybe even get them to reconcile—but they had very little time and there was not much point, when it was unlikely for Loid and Yuri to meet again in the foreseeable future. So instead, she decided to start telling her story, leaving out the part where she was to kill Loid because he was a Westalis spy. She wasn’t a good liar, but nothing she was saying was technically a lie. She told Yuri about Garden, and about the poison, and about the increasingly difficult assignments. She told him that she wanted to escape all of that, and Loid had agreed to come with her, taking their daughter and their dog, the whole family.

She asked, “Will you help us?”

Yuri wore a stern, serious expression now. Yor had never seen him look like that before, not since he had graduated university and told her never to worry about him again. “I’ll see what I can do.”

She grasped his hand and squeezed. “Thank you, Yuri.”

Yuri refused to look at her. “I’m sorry,” he said. His voice came out strangled.

“What for?”

“For not telling you about my work. And… well, you had to do this kind of work because you had to take care of me.”

She supposed that was true. She had had no other real choice. Garden had offered her a tool to protect herself and her brother, with good pay to boot. It had been the only option that would’ve allowed her to still care for her brother and pay for their livelihood.

But that didn’t make it Yuri’s fault.

“I don’t mind, Yuri,” she said. “No, I really don’t. We’re family, aren’t we?”

“Some family we are,” Yuri said, scoffing. “What kind of family keeps secrets like this?”

Yor laughed. She couldn’t help it. She had never known any other kind of family. “I just didn’t want you to worry.”

Yuri wrinkled his nose, suddenly all of twelve years old again in her eyes. “I didn’t want you to worry, either.” Then, he turned toward her and jabbed one finger in her direction. “Loi-loi better not be keeping secrets from you, Sis. Or—”

“Yuri,” Yor said, as gently as she could when she was holding back more laughter. “You don’t need to worry about me. I’m alright.”

“You’re leaving the country,” he whined.

“And I have my family with me, and we’ll keep each other safe.” She reached forward and patted his hair, just like she had used to do all those years ago. “And I don’t know when, but we’ll meet again, alright? We’ll find a way.”

He smiled at her, eyes brimming with tears. She braced herself for a tackling hug, or at least a little howl of misery. Her brother had always been a little overprotective of her.

But Yuri did none of those things. Instead, he stood up and wiped the corners of his eyes and said, “Alright. I better get back and see if I can smuggle you out of the country.”

“Talk to Loid,” she suggested. “He has a plan.”

Yuri made a face, but didn’t argue—and for a moment, Yor sat there, realizing that her brother had truly grown up. That they both had grown up, really, and grown apart.

And though an aching part of her would always be here, in Berlint, she was glad that she did not need to worry over her little brother anymore.

Anya was okay. She liked being at school. She hated studying, but it wasn’t so bad with her friends helping her. Better than when Papa or Mama helped her, anyway. Papa always thought too much. Mama kept thinking of other things. Like that game where you say a word and your friend has to say a related word, except Mama could play it on her own. They kind of sucked at teaching, Mama and Papa.

Anya missed them so much. Mama more than Papa, because at least Papa still came to her some days. Papa was always sad since Mama died, but he would try to smile for Anya, and muss up Anya’s hair, and hold Anya’s hand. They’d watch a movie and eat some ice cream and play at the park with Bond and Uncle Scruffy, and then Anya could go back to the dorm, her pockets full of sweets, and she didn’t have to hear Papa try not to think about Mama for another week and Papa didn’t have to hear Anya crying herself to sleep every night. Papa was such a dummy. It would be better if he just let himself miss Mama. And then Anya could tell him that she missed Mama, too, and they could miss Mama together and he didn’t have to work so much at spying and Anya could live at home again.

But it was okay. It was easier for Papa if Anya stayed at the dorm, so Anya stayed at the dorm. Anya liked the dorm fine. The food was yummy and the bed was nicer than the one at home, and when Anya couldn’t sleep she could meet up with Sy-on Boy at the common room and he would read her a boring book until she really did fall asleep, and she would wake up in her bed and he would lie and said he didn’t call a teacher to help carry her to her bed. He was kind of nice, when he wasn’t annoying, but when he was nice he was sad, too. Like Anya. Like Papa.

Becky wasn’t sad, but Becky didn’t stay at the dorm. Anya wished Becky did, but Becky said her parents wouldn’t let her.

“Well, and my house is much nicer than the dorm too, of course, and my private chef knows my favorite desserts better than anyone. Maybe you should stay with me instead at my house, Anya.”

Anya scrunched up her nose. “No way.” The mission said to get close to Sy-on Boy, and Sy-on Boy stayed at the dorm.

“What a straightforward rejection! Ahh, you’re breaking my heart, Anya,” Becky said, even though she wasn’t sad at all. “Well, whatever. We can just—eee!”

Becky sounded like she was choking on a peanut shell. Anya could relate. But then Anya heard it. Heard Papa. Anya followed Becky’s eyes and found Papa at the school gate, waiting. His thoughts sounded different. Lighter. Anya almost didn’t notice it was him.

“Half an hour to pack her belongings—there shouldn’t be too much, and we’re going to leave her school things behind anyway—and then fifty minutes to the border—no, we have to wait until sundown before we cross the border, less chance of Yor being seen—”

“Papa!” Anya yelled, then launched herself across the cobblestone path until she collided with her father’s shin. He caught her by the armpits, then lifted her up.

“Anya, that was dangerous. You could’ve fallen,” Papa scolded, but he wasn’t angry at all. Papa was—Papa was happy. He was smiling. He thought, “Good thing Yor’s waiting in the car, she would’ve knocked her wig off trying to catch Anya.”

And Anya was confused. She didn’t get it. Why was Papa talking about Mama? But then a picture flashed in Papa’s mind, and it was Mama, and Mama was wearing a yellow wig but it was Mama and Mama was alive and Mama was waiting for them in the car!

“Ma—” Anya started, then slapped her hands over her mouth. “Ma, ma, may Anya go home with Papa today?”

Papa looked a little sad, his thoughts turning cloudy. “Anya, I was thinking—you see, this city isn’t very good for me—” (“Because both Yor’s organization and my agency will start hunting us as soon as they notice we’re both still alive,” he thought.) “—so how about we move, hm? I know you’ve been making friends, but…” And Papa stopped there, because he realized he couldn’t promise that Anya would meet any of her friends again.

Anya knew all about running away from bad guys. There was a character in Bondman that had to do that, move to another country and change his name. The bad guys got to them anyway.

But Mama was alive, and Papa wasn’t sad anymore, and they could beat any bad guy that wanted to take them down.

“Bond is coming too,” Papa said. “We’ll stop by Franky’s to get him later.”

Anya nodded. She was satisfied. “Can Anya say bye-bye first?”

Papa smiled at her and set her back down. “Of course, Peanut.”

Peanut! Papa had never called Anya that before, but Anya liked it. Anya liked peanuts. She beamed at her Papa and scurried back to Becky, who was thinking about how much she wanted Anya’s Papa to carry her like that, too. Anya didn’t like that. Becky had her own Papa. But Anya liked Becky, and so she hugged Becky really tight, and promised solemnly:

“Anya will see you again one day.”

“What’s with you?” Becky asked. “We still have school tomorrow, dummy.”

“Anya’s moving.”

“Where?”

“Don’t know.”

“Why?”

Anya thought long and hard about this, and then finally said, “Papa’s really sick so we have to go to the sea,” which was the plot of Berlint In Love some weeks ago, which had made Becky cry for three days straight.

Becky gasped (“Oh, it must be the loss of his wife! He’s dying from heartbreak!”) and ran to Anya’s Papa, and that was when Anya noticed Sy-on Boy hanging around, staring at them.

“What’s up?” Sy-on Boy asked, all casual, but his thoughts were loud with questions.

“Anya’s leaving for the sea. Papa’s dying.”

“Huh?! Are you okay?”

“Anya will see you again, too…” Anya said, then hesitated, then nodded firmly to herself. “Damian.”

Sy-on Boy’s face grew bright and red and he turned away because he hated to be seen when he looked like a lobster. “Huh—yeah! Sure! Okay!” he said, and then, “Don’t get behind on your studies or we won’t be classmates anymore when you’re back!”

Anya made a face. He made a face back. Sy-on Boy was so stupid sometimes.

Becky returned, teary-eyed, and hugged Anya again, and suddenly Anya was crying, too, because Anya was sad that she had to go but Anya was happy that Papa was back for her and Mama was alive and she could live with them again, and Anya didn’t know she could be sad and happy at the same time, and she was confused, and so she cried even harder until Papa picked her up and wiped her face with his hanky.

“No, Papa, put me down, Anya was just saying goodbye!”

Papa put her down and Anya stood tall and a little snotty and put a hand to her heart, like Bondman did when he was being honest, and said, “Goodbye, Anya’s comrades.”

Which only made Becky cry harder, except this time Becky dragged Sy-on Boy into the hug, and they cried like that, Anya and her friends, until they couldn’t cry anymore so they settled with trading their things to remember each other, and that was how Anya left Eden Academy: with her pockets heavy of little trinkets from her friends and her heart full of all sorts of feelings and her hand in her Papa’s.

They went to the dorm, Anya and her Papa, and Papa helped Anya pack all her things in a suitcase. Then, they walked to the car park and there Mama was, in the front seat, and Anya almost called out to Mama except Papa put a finger to his mouth and made a shh sound.

“Listen, Anya. No one knows—that is, your Mama, some very bad men are after her, okay? So can you be quiet for a little?”

Anya nodded, firm. This was her mission. Operation: Protect Agent Mama. “Oui,” he said to Papa, and Papa smiled and opened the car door and Anya tumbled into Mama’s arms and Mama was bony now, but it was okay because she was still Mama and Mama was crying which meant Anya had to be okay. For Mama.

“There, there,” Anya said, patting Mama’s head. The wig was scratchy and weird and not as smooth as Mama’s real hair, and Mama’s thoughts were loud and full of I’m sorry and oh, Anya’s grown so much and my daughter, mine, what if they find us and take her? Anya continued patting Mama’s fake scratchy hair for a little while, then slumped into Mama’s chest and clung to her. “There, there, Mama. It will be okay.”

Anya believed it. She had her Mama and Papa back, and soon she would have Bond back, too, and all four of them could beat any bad guy.

They went to the outskirts of the city to meet Franky. He had Bond in tow; Anya immediately threw her arms around the dog, who was all too happy to meet them again, and for a while the two spent some time running around in the empty plains, Yor chasing after them. Loid allowed himself a few seconds to watch his family play under the twilit sky before turning to his informant.

Franky was staring at him with a raised eyebrow.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Franky said, shaking his head. “Good for you, actually, for escaping that life.”

Loid snorted. “Thanks.”

“I mean it, man. I’ve seen you the past few months. You were…”

“Miserable?”

“I was going for ‘a walking corpse’, but yeah. Why not.” From inside his coat, Franky extracted a thick brown envelope. “Here. Farewell gift.”

The gift was a long list of contacts across the continents, hastily scribbled on a sheet of folio paper, and two sets of passports for them, each with different names and nationalities. The workmanship on the passports was well-done, nowhere near the quality of a rushed order. Loid looked up at Franky, frowning. “How long have you had these?”

“Eh, a while. I had a hunch, that’s all. Yuri Briar is helping you cross the border, you said?”

“Yes, but he’s not coming with us.” Loid still couldn’t take his eyes off the passports. He had been preparing himself to travel without papers, to smuggle and sneak and bribe their way past authorities, but these would save him a lot of time, money, and energy.

Somehow, Franky had known that Agent Twilight would one day shed that name and bring his family with him into a new life. And instead of lecturing him about attachments and duty to the mission, Franky had given Loid Forger his blessings.

Carefully, Loid tucked away the envelope in his jacket’s inner pocket. “Thank you.”

Franky sucked in a breath, then exhaled. He gave Loid what looked to be an attempt on a rakish grin. It was a little wobbly. “Good luck.”

“I’ll send word once we’re settled,” Loid said on impulse. It was a silly promise to make. One that could put them at even more risk than they already were.

He didn’t take it back. Not even when Franky stared him down, disbelieving.

“I’d like that,” Franky said slowly. He blinked, then blinked again. “Ah, shit, damn it,” he said, sniffling. Tears rolled fat and heavy from his eyes. “I didn’t want to cry over this! Look what you’ve done!”

Loid couldn’t help but smile a little helplessly. His own face is still puffy from all the crying he’d done this morning. He patted Franky on the shoulder and did not flinch when his oldest friend threw his arms around him, sobbing into his chest. “It’s been that sort of day, yes.”

The sky was completely dark when the four of them piled into the car: Loid and Yor in the front, Anya and Bond in the back. Yor fussed over Anya’s seatbelt before putting hers on; Loid checked Franky’s gift again as he waited. A small square of memo paper fluttered down from between the passports; he picked it up and froze at Handler’s familiar handwriting, Handler’s trademark cipher. It took only a moment to decipher it:

I’ll try to stall HQ for a bit. Good luck, kid.

He stared at it longer. Surely there was a different code written there. Something else, something damning. A threat. A trap.

He found nothing.

Next to him, Yor placed her hand over the hand he had on the gearstick. “Is everything okay?”

He turned to her slowly. “Yor—I think I just got fired.”

“Oh, no,” she said, clearly attempting to tamp down a smile. “We’re both unemployed.”

“How worrisome,” he agreed, tucking the memo paper back into the envelope and placing the envelope in his pocket once more.

Yor squeezed his hand, bracing. “We’ll manage, dear.” Then, she turned to face Anya and Bond. Ready?” she asked.

“Ready!” Anya exclaimed from the back, and Bond made a borf sound of approval.

“Alright, then,” Loid said as he started the car and turned on the headlights. The road forward was dark and bumpy, but it would take them to where they needed to be. They would be just fine.