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1
Once a month or two have passed, long enough for them to fall into a comfortable family routine, and they’ve finally reached the point where his fake wife doesn’t startle whenever he looks at her, Twilight begins to wonder about Yor’s upbringing.
Not her parents.
No, he’s well aware that they died leaving her to fend for her younger brother herself.
What he actually wonders about is, well, her upbringing because she was only seven when they died.
Who woke her up every morning? Who taught her how to pack a lunch box? Who showed her which bus to take to drop Yuri off at school? He knows that her own schooling fell to the wayside but who explained to her that school was no longer a realistic option? Who explained realistic options to an orphaned seven year old? Who taught her to keep a clean home? How to sweep and mop? To use vinegar for limescale and baking soda for blood stains left behind by scraped knees?
The answer, he assumes, is similar to that of his own upbringing.
Yet when he stumbles upon her on Sunday mornings deep cleaning with an arsenal of sprays and chemicals —using the cheaper synthetic products she assures him she prefers that, he can admit, work much better than the all-natural products he’d bought—humming a disjointed tune with a smile so bright it reflects on the sparkling fridge door, he still wonders.
Because there has to be more to it.
There has to be a reason someone faced with the same odds that made him cold, and calculated, and this can float around the apartment armed with a duster and a smile that could trigger a myocardial infarction.
2
He wonders, sometimes, whether Yor thinks of him as a good father.
It’s an unimportant thought, all things considered.
It doesn’t matter what she thinks. Being a “good” father only matters within the context of the mission. It matters what Eden Academy thinks of him and what Anya tells them about him.
If he were to get sentimental about it then it would make more sense to wonder what Anya thinks of him, wouldn’t it? She is his daughter, afterall. But he found her at an orphanage. And she is still so young and has been so open-hearted with the both of them that he wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t remember her actual father at all. She’d cried when reminded of her mother but she’s never shown any signs of emotion for her father. If he squints he could probably fool himself into believing that maybe he is the only father she’s ever had.
Perhaps, he is.
(He does wonder about her, too, though there is little to ponder with a daughter so prone to blabbing.)
He barely had a father himself. His father is a blurry memory of sharp angles, sharp words with a disappointed slant to his mouth. He's sure that isn’t a completely fair assessment. Memory has a way of boiling a person down to their best or worst and he probably cannot even trust that valuation because he hasn’t had a father for so long.
He's sure his father smiled. He’s sure he laughed. He may have even played with him when he was younger. He can’t remember, really, but that doesn’t mean it never happened.
But regardless, all he has to go on is his memory, and so his own experience with fathers is remembered as less than ideal.
He doesn’t know the metric by which to judge fathers.
Good, bad, and anything in between.
So he wonders.
Am I a good father?
And, if he’s being honest, “good” should really be “great” because that’s what he aims for, what the mission demands of him. Excellence. Always. In all things.
But, sometimes when he’s laying in bed and he thinks back to how he treated Anya in his early days as her parent, he would settle for good. He wants good. And sometimes good feels like it’ll slip from his fingers if he looks away for a moment.
And he’s not even sure why he wants Yor to think of him as a good father.
Perhaps, because she lives with them and therefore has the most experiential knowledge of his fathering while also not being liable to call him a meanie just for not letting her have peanuts for dinner. Perhaps because she’s already raised a child.
He’s not sure.
And sometimes when Anya stomps away because he’s told her to do her homework or stop watching cartoons or lost his temper over something small, he catches himself looking for Yor’s reaction. A scrunched up nose, a disapproving frown, disbelief. That same slant of disappointment. Something.
He never finds anything but a reassuring smile and an offer to go calm their daughter down. It doesn’t answer his unasked question. And it does nothing to the pit deep feeling of guilt and shame he feels at his daughter's displeasure—doesn’t dislodge it or add any weight to it. It’s nothing really. A nothing response.
And yet, he thanks her for her offer every single time.
And he means it every single time.
So he shuts his mouth, watches her walk to Anya’s room, and he does his best to pretend that her answer wouldn’t even matter either way.
3
He wonders if it should bother him more that the woman he’s pretending to love, that he’s pretending to raise a family with, reminds him so much of the mother he lost.
It would make sense if it did.
He still dreams about her.
His mother.
He sees blonde hair, blue eyes, and that wrinkle at the bridge of her nose when she would laugh. He remembers her chasing him down hills, the two of them rolling around in the grass with the sky at their feet and the earth under their fingernails. He remembers being loved by her.
Those are the good dreams.
He doesn’t have many of those.
Often he dreams of her absence. He dreams of searching through smoke clouds and breathing in debris as he looks for her in a town that isn’t theirs. He dreams of a limp hand, empty eyes, and blood. He never found her body in real life, he never saw her crushed and broken, but in his nightmares he does.
It should bother him that something about this petite dark-haired woman he’s depending on reminds him so strongly of his mother. It should.
It doesn’t, though.
Not even a little bit.
And he’s not entirely sure why it doesn’t bother him.
Perhaps, he’s not sat with the thought long enough. He hasn’t categorised the pieces of Yor’s soul with those that could have slotted into his mother’s. There have been so many other things to do, so many disasters to avert, and he hasn’t had the time to think about his feelings. Or maybe, more likely, he isn’t bothered because that may just be the very thing keeping him falling apart.
4
It’s obvious that her coworker was insinuating some kind of inappropriate employment back at that party all those months ago but, for the life of him, he can’t imagine what exactly that job could be.
The implication of massages to strange men in hotel rooms reads as a blatant insinuation of prostitution. Which, in all honesty, wouldn’t be the worst thing for his fake wife to be. A prostitute, in general, would be better suited to the more dishonest parts of faking a marriage. Public kisses, hand holding, closeness. And though maybe even a prostitute would find the situation of the Forger Family odd, he is almost certain he wouldn’t have to fear a throbbing cheek or a swollen upper lip from his nervous wife.
Yor isn’t a prostitute.
She can’t be.
(At least, not a successful one. Considering. Though, perhaps, she could be a dominatrix.)
But if that isn’t it then what is it?
Is it just a catty coworker trying to start a rumour—he doesn’t put that past the bottle blonde woman with the permanent sneer—or is there some other truth to it?
“It’s not what you think, Loid!”
Then what, he wonders, is it?
It’s not a major concern (there is, afterall, very little he cannot handle) but he can’t help but wonder about it when he watches her flit around the kitchen. She moves soundlessly, like she’s floating over the wooden floors, and hums off-pitch happily. She never shows much skin but sometimes when she rolls her sleeves up to cook or wash dishes, he spots bruises and cuts. Her knuckles are bruised often. She’s never without a sweet smile, a kind giggle or encouraging word.
There is so much he doesn’t know about her and what he does know doesn’t always add up.
Yor is a shy woman, blushing at the thought of a hand held and nearly melting at the concept of a goodbye kiss. But when anyone close to her is threatened—the aura she exudes would send a fully armed battalion running for the hills. She’s modest in her dressing, gravitating towards sweaters and long leggings. She prefers hot chocolate and tea to coffee. She eats anything put in front of her with a smile on her face and a compliment primed. She’s more skilled with a kitchen knife than any chef, assailant, or killer he’s seen in his decades long career. She loves with her eyes closed and her arms open—vulnerable in a way that makes him both apprehension and relieved.
He can’t imagine a woman like that harbouring some deep dark secret.
(He can imagine it. He has. He just doesn’t believe it.)
And he wonders, if there is something pivotal he doesn’t know about the woman he shares his fake last name with then would it ultimately even matter?
5
It’s rudimentary for a spy to wonder what the motives are of the people around them. Motives, as a concept, are simple. What do people want? What do they need? What are they afraid of? What do they dream about? People are the summation of these things—wants, needs, fears, dreams—and those things drive much of human behaviour. Spies read human behaviour like a psychic reading a crystal ball. They study swirling, nondescript shapes until motives take form and then they mould those to their own whims.
Twilight is an excellent spy.
If he’d been allowed a different life he may have grown up to be an actor or writer or a director. Theatre, more likely than film, because theatre existed in a specific time and space that made it more real than anything recorded. But in this life, the people around him are characters living on scripts he’s constantly putting together and manipulating. He is both a writer, an actor and a director. Oftentimes, when things fall perfectly into place, he is also a producer.
He understands WISE’s objectives.
He understands his Handler’s motives.
Franky. Fiona.
Yuri.
And, though children are as amorphous as fractus clouds, he understands Anya’s motives. As best as he can.
It’s Yor who eludes him.
At first glance, her motives should be clear. A girl who grew up without parents, forced to raise her only brother, grew up to become a sheltered, socially awkward young woman. She wants what most people want. Love, kindness, consideration. She wants a family—one that she won’t lose. She wants to fit in. She wants to belong. Those are the things he sees in her eyes and the slant of her smile when the three of them—fake little family though they may be—sit down together with warm drinks and nothing but time.
But there are other times…
There are times when he happens to be up late—he’s often up late, he doesn’t sleep—and he catches her slipping into the house from the shadows. She wears that dress on those nights. It’s tight, revealing, and not at all something he can imagine amongst her sweaters, leggings, and skirt suits. He’ll greet her then and she’ll look up at him…and it’s only a second. A split second. But in that second, he doesn’t recognize her.
In those moments, she looks at him like she wants nothing. Not her next breath, not her next step, not another moment. Nothing at all. And he doesn’t know why and of course he doesn’t ask because what right does he have to her secrets when his own are so dark? But he’s not heartless. He may have given away parts of himself that he’ll never retrieve but there’s enough of him left over to worry about her.
And other times…
She’s gotten better about having him close. He can reach for her hand in public and be nothing other than a man holding his wife’s hand. When they drop Anya off at the bus, she steps closer to him and he draps an arm over her shoulders. He can reach over her in the kitchen, invading her space to grab a bowl or a plate or a cup, without her tensing and panicking. And, if the moment calls for it, he can kiss her cheek. She smells like lavender, vanilla, and cocoa. Her shampoo is floral. And he knows this because they’ve made so much progress.
And in those moments—after he reaches for her hand, after she rests her head against his shoulder, after she lets out a shaky breath—there’s something else in her eyes. Something that threatens to topple everything they’ve built, everything he’s dedicated his life to. It’s in the blush at her cheeks, the flutter of her lashes, the quickening of her pulse.
He understands motives.
He understands wants, needs, fears, and dreams.
And he understands desire.
He doesn’t understand her though.
Maybe he could. If he tried. But something about that feels like Eve eating the apple, Pandora opening her box, and so he leaves it alone. It exists only in those seconds.
Lavender, vanilla and cocoa.
A second.
Then nothing.
He looks away from her in those moments because he’s a coward. Because he doesn’t have the time to be anything other than Twilight, because he’s human and he has his own motives and he’s afraid that if he was to catch a glimpse of himself in those moments he’d see himself looking at her with the eyes of a traitor.
+1
After ten months and nine days of Loid Forger being married to Yor Briar, Twilight finally knows what it’s like to kiss her.
It happens when he is least expecting it and If he’d planned it then it never would have happened like this.
It’s summer vacation at Eden Academy and Anya is sick. She’s been sick for the better part of a week—sore throat, runny nose, fatigue and fevers. He's not a real doctor but he was once a child and he knows that children get sick so he doesn’t worry too much. Yor doesn’t worry either. She’s raised a child before and she recognizes this for exactly what it is so she calls in for the week and plays nurse to their daughter.
Soup.
Water.
Cuddles on the couch watching copious amounts of cartoons.
All is, if not well, then normal until it isn’t.
He finds out in the waiting room of the paediatric emergency department that when children, small children like his daughter who has always looked much too small to be six years old, have high fevers sometimes they can have what is called a febrile seizure. A febrile seizure, in layman's terms, is a type of convulsion that can happen in children when their temperature gets too high. During a febrile seizure the child may become stiff, twitch or shake. They may even lose consciousness. It is distressing to witness, a real doctor tells them, but not usually harmful with no long term effects.
Anya’s seizure lasted four minutes and by the time she’d opened her eyes she was in the back of an ambulance with her mother.
It’s hard for Twilight to believe the doctor when his daughter is hooked up to a fluid drip and his wife hasn’t stopped crying. He can feel words—Does this look harmless to you? Does this look like there won’t be long lasting effects? Look at my daughter. Look at my wife—swelling under his chest like a thunderstorm. It’s anger and fear and guilt and sadness sharpened by the grief he keeps imagining even though he sees Anya’s chest rising and falling with sleep. He wants to scream. He wasn’t to rage and make a scene. He wants to pull out his revolver and shoot the next person who asks him to calm down.
He doesn’t do that.
Instead, he sits down next to his wife at their daughter's bedside. Yor reaches for his hand first and when her fingers slip between his own they feel colder than they’ve ever been. She’s still crying, silent tears that occasionally shake her shoulders, and because he’s spent ten months with her, he knows that she blames herself. Wants, needs, fears, and dreams. He doesn’t know if she ever saw her parents in the hospital or if their town handled the funeral arrangements but he imagines sitting here feels a lot like losing her family again.
He isn’t surprised when she tightens her hold on his hand. He squeezes right back.
The doctor returns some time later to tell them that Anya is a healthy little girl fighting off a strep throat infection who will be fine to go home with some antibiotics and painkillers. They both breathe a sigh of relief and half an hour later the small family is piled in their car on the way home.
Night times at the Forger residence have always been dedicated to routine. Mainly, Anya’s. And this doesn’t change tonight. Anya is snoring softly in his arms when they enter the apartment, breath ever so slightly wheezy and nose clogged, and the three of them move to her room like ghosts. Neither he nor Yor remove their jackets or their shoes. They’ll clean the carpet later. Right now, they enter their daughters room and Yor pulls out fresh pyjamas. She fluffs Anya’s pillow, rearranges the stuffed animals. Refills the water glass at her bedside. She flits around the room like a hummingbird, he can almost hear the thumping of her heart echoing in the space. Part of him worries that when she stops she’ll collapse.
She does eventually, though. She stands up straight and holds out her hands to him. He slides Anya off his chest and hands her to her mother, marvelling at how light she feels. This little human feels like she weighs less than nothing and yet the whole world has stopped for her.
Yor places her into her bed, pulls the covers up, tucks her in, and presses a kiss to her forehead.
Then she sits on the bed.
Usually, whichever one of them puts her to bed, slinks out of the room and flicks off the light. Usually, they leave her to sleep alone.
He would have never planned tonight and so they stay.
He moves to sit next to his wife. She has her hands folded in her lap like she’s praying, and doesn’t say anything when the bed dips from his added weight.
They stay like that for a while. He can’t be sure what she’s thinking about but he’s thinking about smoking towns and broken bones. He’s thinking about how life is made of big and small things—big and small happiness, big and small sadness, big and small heartaches. He thinks about the world ending the day his town was bombed, the world ending when his father never came home, the world ending when his mother died. When his found his friends only to lose them again. When he spent years fighting a war that was still brewing in the background of everyday life. Then he thinks about today. He thinks about how his heart had nearly stopped when he heard the word seizure, when he saw his daughter bundled up in a hospital bed. It’s a wonder really how life can keep finding new ways of breaking you if you just live long enough.
A war, a child, a wife.
It’s too much to think about tonight. He’s exhausted in every possible way.
He’s about to excuse himself for the night—give Anya a kiss on the forehead, check her temperature one more time, slink back to his own room to tell his handler he won’t be coming to report tomorrow and sleep—when Yor suddenly turns to face him.
She’s beautiful. Always. Shiny black hair, big red eyes and features that should be etched in stone. She’s been beautiful from the moment he met her and he imagines she will always be beautiful. Nothing will change that. Not the shiny wetness of her eyes, the strain in her brow, or the tear marks dried in her cheeks. Not the tired sadness that she wears so openly on her face.
She says his name slowly. Her lips purse with the shape of it and he watches as her tongue touches the top row of her teeth. Loid.
He hums in acknowledgement.
The night is quiet. There are a few cars still on the road, headlights flooding the room with white light every so often and the sound of tread on asphalt. Anya’s night light is plugged in and the ceiling is a glow with slowly rotating stars. Their daughter is snoring, snuggled up next to Mr. Penguin where she belongs. Bond is sitting at the foot of the bed.
She says his name again and this time he looks at her.
He’s often wondered what she wants. Her wants, desires, fears, dreams. His wife is the one person, it seems, that is not wholly knowable to him. She exists in moments and segments, in separate entities that slink in and out of his world as they please. Sometimes she wants nothing. Sometimes she wants what everyone seems to want. Sometimes, he swears, she wants things that would end the world. And sometimes, she wants things he hasn’t ever admitted to wanting himself. He knows all this. And yet, he knows nothing.
He’s looking at her. Blue eyes drowning in red. An ocean against the sun. And suddenly he knows more than he was ever supposed to know.
And by the time he realises his mistake, she’s leaning into him and then they’re kissing.
It should have never happened.
And if it was to happen then it should have never happened like this.
There is no sound in the room. He’s not sure that either of them is breathing. She tastes like salt, peppermint tea, and exhaustion. She’s leaning towards him with her left hand bearing down on the bed as she reaches for him. She smells like she always does, like her lotion and her perfume, like this little home they’ve built together. And it makes him dizzy. The whole room, the whole world, is spinning to the side off of its axis—tilted by fear and relief and sadness and her—and it’s all he can do to hold on and remember who he’s supposed to be.
Who was he before this happened? Who was he before he knew that her lips were warmer than her hands? What was he doing before his hand found her jaw and his thumb swiped warm tears from her cheeks? What on earth had been more important to dwell on than the small tremors building under his skin at the feeling of her lips on his?
She’s still crying. In fact, she might be crying more.
He moves away, preparing to ask her if she's okay, when she scoots closer, holds him tighter, and silences anything he could say with a harder press of her lips. And so he stays. He holds her tighter, he adjusts the tilt of her head, and he kisses her back. Again. Again and again. Until the headlights stop their flood of light and slowly the sounds of the room slot back into place.
She pulls away then.
And as she pulls away, he wants more than anything to pull her back.
They don’t discuss the kiss that night. They don’t discuss it the next night either. Or the next week.
They don’t mention it at all until a month later when it happens again. And by the time it happens a third time they’ve stopped wondering what it means.
But Twilight is a creature of habit, one built through grueling training and secrets.
And even when he pretends not to, Twilight never stops wondering.
He wonders if a feeling like this can truly be built to last.
He imagines it can’t be.
He imagines it can.
But he’d never say it out loud either way because he knows better than most that life dishes out its harshest punishments to wishful thinkers.
+2
He knows it can’t.