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There are many misconceptions about what makes a good spy a good spy.
Some think that good spies are good spies because they are good at fighting, or shooting, or wielding weapons. Some believe that their strength comes from intelligence, from the ability to solve problems quickly, from ingenuity and creativity under high pressure. Others think that physical brawn is the most important, or speed, or endurance.
While all of that is important, none of those things is what makes a good spy a good spy. Ultimately, a spy could function without any of these skills. If you can’t fight, you can hide. If you can’t solve problems or crack codes or think up plans, you can let someone else do it for you.
No – the most important skill for a spy, more important than anything else, is the ability to blend in. A spy who stands out will blow their own cover before they’ve even gotten close to their target. A spy needs to avoid drawing attention to themselves.
For Westalian spies, that means that they need to look like an Ostanian, act like an Ostanian – and, most importantly, speak like an Ostanian. It means learning the Ostanian language; mastering it, killing their accents the way they would kill an enemy, and never, ever, slipping back into their native language around Ostanians. Despite the fragile peace between the two countries, Westalians are still regarded with suspicion in Ostania. Immigrants are reported to the secret police every day.
So blending in in Ostania means speaking the language, and speaking it flawlessly enough to pass as an Ostanian. If you can’t do that, you cannot survive as a spy.
That is what makes a good spy a good spy: language. It is the most grueling part of training, and the part that takes the most time. Language is what makes the difference between a good spy and a dead spy.
Twilight has never particularly struggled with learning the Ostanian language. He’s a natural at blending in, and he has a good memory. Within no time, he learned to speak like an Ostanian. His affinity for the language has allowed him to finish many a mission successfully, flawlessly. It has allowed him to become as extraordinary at his job as he is. Not once has he ever slipped up.
…Operation Strix being the unfortunate exception.
Twilight has always prided himself on his mastery of the Ostanian language, but Operation Strix has this way of getting under his skin, of making him forget everything he’s learned. He finds himself slipping up more and more often, his usual sharpness dulled underneath the constant stress and exhaustion.
He spends nights sleepless and only barely holds himself back from saying “good morning” in the wrong language over breakfast. He misreads the instructions in a recipe and messes up a batch of cookies. One time, after thirty consecutive hours of side missions, he comes home and hits his shin against the corner of the coffee table, and he swears in Westalian; thankfully, with no one around to hear him except Bond. He mispronounces “outing” as “ooting” once, and he lies awake that night wondering what happened to the decade of language training that he’s been through.
Being in close proximity to Anya has delivered some serious blows to his confidence in his language skills as well. It’s difficult to communicate with her, sometimes. Twilight speaks Ostanian flawlessly, but he’s used to speaking to people who also speak Ostanian flawlessly. Anya, on the other hand, is still just a kid, and she doesn’t always speak clearly and she messes up her grammar and she makes up words that don’t exist, and Twilight can’t consistently understand her. As extensive as his training was, none of it prepared him for having to communicate with a six-year-old. It’s the cause of many a headache, especially during his first few weeks as Loid Forger.
And then there’s Yor… who speaks Ostanian well, albeit with a lot of embarrassed stammering, and it’s worse when she’s had a drink – but the language itself is not the issue here. There’s just something about her that makes Twilight let down his guard. He just gets too comfortable around her. When he’s around her, or around Anya, he finds himself forgetting that he’s supposed to be on high alert all the time. When he’s around his family, he sometimes forgets that the slightest slip-up could lead to Yor reporting him to the secret police.
That comfortableness makes him sloppy, and it’s dangerous. The Handler reminds him of that each time they speak: language is what makes the difference between a good spy and a dead spy. It was one of the first things that Twilight learned, and he can’t let himself forget it.
Still, there are moments when he forgets, despite his carefulness and the Handler’s warnings – moments when his exhaustion gets the better of him. So far, he has been lucky; he’s somehow gotten away with his slip-ups.
That luck can’t last forever, though.
It starts, as most things start these days, with Anya. She comes home from school one day and cheerfully informs her parents that half of her class stayed home, sick with the flu. The half of her class that did show up, was coughing pretty bad.
Twilight can already predict what’s about to happen; he goes out that afternoon to stock up on cough medicine and child-safe painkillers. The parenting books warned him about this moment. They warned him that, before he knows it, the entire household will be sick.
That doesn’t happen, though. Anya doesn’t get sick. Yor doesn’t get sick. Twilight finds himself believing that, somehow, they got lucky.
And then he wakes up with a headache and a fever and a nasty cough, and he curses himself for getting optimistic.
He calls in sick that day, for the first time in years – he hasn’t been sick in decades, but it seems that the stress has compromised his immune system, along with the fact that he is in constant close proximity to a child. He feels thoroughly pathetic about it, but the fever has made him too dizzy to stand upright, and he’s so sore that he can barely move. He’s smart enough to know that it’s a terrible idea to take on a side mission like this.
He calls up WISE first, explaining himself in code and apologizing. He calls up the hospital next, to inform his colleagues that he won’t be coming in today. He hopes that the rasp in his throat doesn’t sound like an accent. It makes him uncomfortable to sound different than he usually does.
By the time he’s hung up the phone, he’s gotten too tired to keep his eyes open. Yor and Anya have caught on to the situation by now – not that there was any realistic possibility of hiding it, not when Twilight can’t go two minutes without coughing his lungs out – and they gently usher him over to the couch. Anya insists on gathering every blanket in the apartment and making him a blanket fort, and Twilight lets her. She has to leave for school before she can finish the fort, though, so the blanket fort remains just a pile of blankets, a heavy weight on Twilight’s chest. He doesn’t mind. It’s comfortable.
Yor makes him a cup of tea – she’s a bit heavy on the honey, but Twilight can’t bring himself to complain – and brings him painkillers. She stays home so that she can keep an eye on him; they both agree that Yor staying home to take care of her sick husband is an excellent way to keep up their façade as a loving normal family.
As she calls City Hall to explain the situation, Twilight dozes off on the couch, too tired and achy to stay awake. Bond lies on the floor next to the couch, and Twilight absent-mindedly rests his hand on Bond’s head.
It’s strange, Twilight finds himself thinking, as sleep claims him steadily. Now that he’s too exhausted to do much of anything, the lines between ‘Loid’ and ‘Twilight’ have blurred; it’s not Loid who is lying sick on the couch, it’s Twilight. ‘Loid’ is a mask that he’s too tired to wear right now. He knows that this should concern him, but he’s too feverish to be concerned about anything. In a way, it’s nice, even, to let his guard down for a moment. Twilight never gets to rest.
So he lets himself rest, sleeping on the couch underneath his mountain of blankets. He sleeps through the morning and most of the afternoon. When he wakes up again, Yor is gently laying a damp washcloth on his forehead.
Twilight groggily blinks his eyes open, squinting up at her. Her gaze finds his, and her mouth drops open a little in surprise. “Ah-- Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you up,” she says. “I was just worried that you were getting too warm, so I figured I should try to lower your temperature a little. Can’t have you dying on me.” She gives a little laugh.
Twilight nods. “Yeah. Can’t argue with that.” His voice scratches in his throat; a coughing fit follows. He pushes himself up on his elbow, coughing into his hand. He finds that moving isn’t as difficult as he expected – most of the blankets are missing, he notices. Bond is curled up underneath them in one of the chairs, snoring contentedly.
The coughing fit greedily steals away all the energy that he’d been building up; by the time Twilight has finally gotten rid of the itch in his throat, he feels a little lightheaded, and the exertion has left him uncomfortably warm. He lowers himself back down to the couch, a soft groan escaping from his mouth. His head feels like it’s filled with something heavy.
The washcloth has slipped off his face in the commotion; Yor picks it up from the floor, frowning at it. “It’s covered in dog hair,” she says, straightening up. “I’ll go grab a clean one. I’ll be back in a second, okay?”
Twilight makes an agreeing sound, and she disappears from his field of vision. He can faintly hear her opening and closing a bathroom cabinet, followed by the sound of rushing tap water. The noise is soothing, somehow. It lulls him back to sleep a little.
He doesn’t hear Yor return, but he’s vaguely aware of the fact that she presses a damp washcloth against his neck and face, dabbing away the sweat before settling the washcloth on his forehead. It’s blissfully cold. He exhales a sigh of relief.
He gives Yor a tired smile, his eyes still closed. “Thank you,” he murmurs groggily – and he can feel his throat close up as soon as the words leave his mouth. The stuffiness in his head clears instantly, replaced by cold panic.
He let down his guard. He forgot, just briefly, to focus on what he’s saying.
He thanked Yor in Westalian, in the wrong damn language, and now his entire cover might be blown.
His eyes snap open and find Yor’s face, hoping to gauge her reaction. She just raises an eyebrow at him, a puzzled smile pulling at her lips. “Sorry, what’d you say?” she asks him.
He clears his throat. “I said, ‘thank you’,” he repeats, this time in Ostanian. He hopes – prays – that she wasn’t paying attention to his slip-up. Hoping is pretty much the only thing he can do; he is in no condition to talk his way out of this, not right now.
Her smile widens, and she tucks her hair behind her ear. She opens her mouth to reply, but a loud knock on the front door interrupts her, followed by Anya’s voice: “I’m home!”
Yor turns away from him again to let Anya in, the conversation forgotten. Twilight closes his eyes, trying to analyze her expressions from the past ten seconds. Did she look suspicious at any moment? Did she even realize that he was speaking Westalian at all? He’s not sure; his head hurts too much.
Anya distracts him after that, sitting on the couch with him and telling him about her day. Twilight can barely listen. He screwed up. He screwed up bad, and he needs to find a way to remedy this.
He decides that they have to talk about it. He screwed up, and Yor saw it. Pretending it didn’t happen somehow doesn’t feel right. He wants her to trust him, even though that’s a ridiculous thing to want in his situation. So he decides to bring it up again as soon as he feels a bit better.
That moment comes later that evening, after two painkillers, a lukewarm bath and a simple meal of canned chicken soup. Yor and Twilight are sitting at the dinner table, and Anya is sitting on the couch, watching an episode of ‘Spy Wars’. She doesn’t seem to be paying attention to her parents.
Twilight is idly staring at the television as well, pretending to watch the episode when instead he’s trying to gather the courage to talk. His heart is hammering in his chest – he’d thought that he was feeling a bit better, but the anxiety has made his headache return, and he feels a little nauseous.
His body is yelling at him to go lie down. Maybe he should just leave the subject alone. He can’t help but imagine what would happen if he did that, though. If he didn’t explain himself, Yor would definitely get suspicious. She may not be the kind of person to call the secret police on him, but she might share her concerns with her brother, and that’s possibly even worse. Twilight can already imagine himself sitting in an interrogation room, his hands chained to a table while Yuri Briar tries to pry his secrets out of him by whatever means necessary. Not good.
He clears his throat before he can change his mind. “Ah, Yor?” he asks, turning to her. “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
Yor’s expression turns into something serious, and Twilight feels his chest tighten with anxiety. “What is it, Loid?” she asks.
“I-- Uhm, I said something to you earlier,” Twilight says. “When I thanked you, and you couldn’t understand me the first time. Do you remember?”
Yor nods, her eyes wide. She seems anxious, too.
Her nervous expression spurs him on; better to rip the band-aid off as quickly as he can. He takes a breath, forcing himself calm. “It makes sense that you couldn’t understand me,” he says, looking away from her. “I accidentally spoke Westalian to you. It’s my native language, but I don’t speak it anymore because most people think it’s suspicious. I’m not from Ostania.” It’s as close to the truth as he dares to get.
He bites the inside of his cheek, waiting for Yor’s reaction. It’s risky, telling her all of this. In theory, being truthful – as truthful as possible – should help him seem less suspicious. Speaking Westalian and then trying to hide it, that’s suspicious, but being honest about it should work.
If it doesn’t work, though, he has just revealed far too much about himself.
He glances at her face, and he finds an expression that he hadn’t expected: she looks relieved. “I was scared that you were going to say something worse,” she says with a chuckle. “For some reason, I thought that you were going to tell me that we couldn’t live together anymore. You scared me.”
Twilight needs a moment to find the words to reply. “You don’t think that it’s suspicious that I’m from Westalis?”
Yor shakes her head. “No,” she replies, her expression earnest. “Why would I think that?”
Twilight is so surprised that he launches immediately into a coughing fit. When he speaks again, his voice is even hoarser than before. “Do you mean that?” he asks Yor.
“Of course,” she replies. “I know you, Loid. You’re such a hardworking, sincere, loving person. I don’t think I could ever find you suspicious. And even if I did, I’m really not one to talk. I married you because I was scared that people would find me suspicious. I don’t think I have any right to judge you – or, well, anyone, for that matter.”
A weight drops off Twilight’s shoulders. What he does next is impulsive and goes against everything he’s ever been taught, and under other circumstances he would’ve figured that he’s finally lost his mind – but his head is heavy with fever and his heart is light with relief, and he’s speaking before he’s fully realized it.
“Thank you,” he says softly – and he says it in Westalian. “Thank you for trusting me. I never should’ve doubted you.” And, perhaps even more impulsively, he quietly adds three words that he’s never said in Westalian before: “I love you.”
Yor tilts her head at him, a smile on her face. “I have no idea what you just said.”
“Papa says that he loves you!” Anya hollers from the couch, her episode of ‘Spy Wars’ forgotten. “He said he loves you, he said he loves you!” she sing-songs. “Are you gonna kiss now?”
Loid can feel his face grow warm, and Anya cackles gleefully. He does not know where Anya learned Westalian – or maybe this is just another one of her wild guesses that somehow turned out to be scarily correct – but it doesn’t seem to matter right now. Yor is smiling at him; “Is that true, Loid? Is that what you said?”
“Ah, no, well-- I mean, I said that I think you’re wonderful, and that I truly appreciate everything you’ve done for us--”
“Liar!” Anya shouts excitedly, jumping up and down on the couch.
Yor laughs, and Twilight can feel his words catch in his throat; he is fluent in Westalian and Ostanian, but for a moment, he can speak neither. Thankfully, Anya interrupts his moment of speechlessness by abruptly losing her balance and almost falling off the couch. Twilight gets to focus on scolding her for jumping on the furniture instead of trying to explain a damn love confession – what was he thinking? His fever must be messing with his head pretty bad.
The three of them end up spending the evening on the couch, silently watching ‘Spy Wars’ reruns. Twilight still doesn’t trust a word that comes from his mouth, but his earlier anxiety has melted away. He’d been beating himself up over the fact that he’s been losing his edge, that he’s been slipping up too much, that he’s getting too comfortable around his fake family. Not once, in all the possible outcomes for Operation Strix that he’d expected, had he ever considered that that comfortableness could be something good. He had never once considered that maybe he could trust his family.
When Twilight became a spy, he threw away his entire identity: his hope for a normal life, his emotions, his language. He’d thought that he’d gotten rid of those things for good.
Operation Strix has proven him wrong, and he can finally let himself believe that that’s a good thing.