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Loid Forger, he’d decided on the train to Berlint, coffee-stained newspaper in hand, led a fairly ordinary life.
His is a carefully calculated account, a journey marked in old, jaded trinkets from before the war and dog-tags from his time on the front lines and forged graduation certificates and old plushies just big enough to fit into a toddler’s arms. Many from his generation tell similar stories of their own lives, wrought with thorns from the past and flowers of hope for the future, and it is part of what makes Loid Forger likable by design; he had fought to survive, put himself through medical school, built and rebuilt a family of his own. For Twilight, it is crucial to know this man better than the back of his hand, whether he needs to produce finer details that fit the bigger picture or pull a piece off what is already known; a simple jigsaw puzzle of a model Ostanian citizen.
So, when Anya — study break all but forgotten, full of spirited retellings of Becky Blackbell’s birthday party she’d attended last night, and sporting more bits of crayon on the tips of her fingers than she’s scribbled out on her sheet of paper — asks him when his birthday is, all he has to do is thank his luck Yor’s working late and can’t hear her ask him that question, then recall a bit of trivia.
“The tenth of October,” he says. That it is also World Mental Health day is a coincidence, if a bit contrived. A different date slips out somewhere in his head; he ignores it.
Anya stares at him like she’s trying to see through him again. “Wha’s today’s date, Papa?”
“August twenty-seventh,” he says.
“So— so…” she frowns, scrunching up her little face. She sticks out her hands and counts on her fingers. “Twenny-eight, twenny-nine, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two—”
“The first of September,” he corrects.
“Oh! One, two—” She jumps in her chair, holding up seven tiny fingers, both arms high in the air. “So, seven days!”
He blinks, puzzled. “What’s in seven days?”
“Nothing!” Anya slaps her hands back down to the table. “Um, are we going to have a birthday party on— October, uh…”
She had barely asked for anything when she turned seven, he remembers. She’d brought the cake he baked her early that morning to recess to feed her friends, clung to Yor when she came home from school, followed him like a lamb on their trip to the park, and refused to sleep that night until she was nestled in his arms on their couch. Her gifts lay unopened until the next morning; all she insisted on, besides a day’s break from her schoolwork, was time with her family.
The date he’s given her is an empty one, but it is Loid and everything about him that Anya loves, and as far as she knows, everything about him is real and meaningful. If this is something she needs, he’d be remiss not to let her have it.
“Ten,” he supplies, gently mussing up her hair. “We could, if you like. I’d prefer it to be just the four of us, but you can pick what you want to do and where you’d like to go.”
Anya stares at him some more. “But it’s your birthday,” she says. “What do you wanna do?”
That is quite simple. Loid would likely start the day as he does any other, with his family’s yawns and a nourishing breakfast and the half-hour drive to school. He’d go to Berlint General, thank whoever kept track of the date, as wonderfully fateful as they like to say it is, and come home at the end of his shift to spend the rest of his evening with his family. He isn’t the type to want much more than this.
But Anya is ten minutes past the end of her break, so he says, “Finish your homework and I’ll think about it.”
Anya jumps in alarm, but then sets her mouth into a determined little line and drags her notebook closer with a world-weary sigh. He bites back a smile. These past months, his daughter has learned to simply get things she dislikes over with, even though the coursework is often too much for her on her own. He thinks he might be quite proud of her, if he’s entirely honest.
She beams at her homework all of a sudden, bright-eyed and rose-cheeked. Before he can start to hope she might get through this lesson a little easier, Anya scowls at her pencil and waves it in wonky circles over the page like she’s trying to magic an answer out of thin air.
Nothing to worry about, he decides. Yor always knows what to say to calm Anya in seconds, but he’s picked up a trick or two from her over time. She would break the problem into smaller chunks — and here, he’d discovered she was easier to distract than Anya ever was, even though she always managed to ward off the cloud of trouble over Anya’s head and make her laugh; she would tell Anya stories of Yuri’s childhood to lift her spirits; she would ask Anya to tell her about what she liked, let her ramble about what she didn’t.
“Anya,” he says, gently, “what about your classical language worksheet?”
She peeks at him, wary. “I haven’t done it yet…”
“Would you like to?” he asks. It holds little weight in the grand scheme of her curriculum, but she’s good at it — it might ease her into the rest of her homework.
He expects her to shove aside her books and leap at the chance to do something she finds simpler. Instead, she tap-taps the sheet, marking a decimal point into an answer that should be a whole number.
“Papa,” she says before he can speak, frowning at the dot, “what did you like when you were little?”
Math, he tells her. A gamble, really: it’ll either spur her on to study or earn him one of her terrible little frowns. He bets on the latter.
She only stares, opening her mouth and closing it like she’s looking for her words. Eventually, she says, “I don’t like Sy-on boy, but I gotta be nice to ‘im and not punch him again ‘cause it’s bad for peace.”
He knows what she’s trying to say. He pretends he doesn’t. “Peace is important.”
“But if I could pick who to be bestest friends forever with, for peace, I’d pick Becky,” she goes on, carefully. Somehow, he feels like a small dog she’s trying to lead around a hole in the ground so he doesn’t fall in again. “So, if— if you could pick, what would you pick?”
Twilight would want to keep an ear out for intel, perhaps tinker with his radio or read the newspaper. If nothing else, he’d turn to his paperwork. On a good day — not that he remembers having many — he’d try to sleep. But none of that can answer Anya’s question. He isn’t sure he has an answer for her at all.
“Math isn’t all that bad,” he says, nodding at her notebook. Anya huffs and pouts and scowls at her problems again.
Against the scraping of her pencil against paper, he wonders.
What would he pick?
The next morning is rushed. Anya is almost impossible to rouse from sleep, like she’d stayed up for hours after her bedtime. When she finally totters out of her room, she tells the ficus by the wall how absolutely purr-amount it is that she make it to school. She barely keeps half-awake while he dresses her and feeds her, shakes her head rather violently every time he asks if she’d rather stay home, and forgets to let go of his shirt when he tucks her into his car. He knows she has a few quizzes lined up this week — he’d snuck a look at her schedule and her teachers’, and they had been preparing for days — but he asks her to call for him without hesitation should she need to come home the moment her feet touch the ground before the school gates.
Anya raises her arms toward him, blinking away the last dregs of sleep from her eyes.
It is quite the public spot, the curb by the gates, and so Loid kneels to let her fall against him in a hug. She nestles her head under his chin.
He’s about to give in to the guilt burning another ulcer in his stomach and tell her to skip the day when she says, “Master Henny— Hen-der-son doesn’t like it when Anya skips questions on her homework.”
Twilight frowns, concerned. She had grown out of speaking this way months ago. Had something been bothering her enough to push her back into the habit? Perhaps he had overdone it with their preparations, piled her little shoulders with undue stress — and besides, what was that about the homework? “There’s nothing wrong with needing more time to solve difficult problems,” he says. His fingers thread into her hair on an impulse, scrunch gentle circles into her scalp the way it soothes her most. “But I’m sure we’ve dealt with everything you need to turn in today.”
Anya shakes her head. “Papa’s gotta stop skipping questions, too.”
“What—” he starts, but Becky squeals Anya’s name in the distance and his daughter peels herself off him with an ear-splitting squeal of her own and bounds away like she hadn’t been dragging her feet all morning.
It was a simple little thing, he thinks on his way home. A matter of basic preferences, even though Anya had mixed up the past and the present when she asked him about his. Perhaps it was her knack for throwing him for a loop, or that she had managed to pose him the rare sort of problem he couldn’t figure out; whatever it was had driven him to ponder away his idle hours past his family’s bedtime, rifling through every face he had worn and crafted a story for in search of answers. Had he remembered what hobbies he might have liked to indulge in, back when he first went undercover? Had he based his characters on what he had once wanted to be and to do, or on the people he had once known, if only to perform their roles better?
He couldn’t remember if he had. It was strange, not being able to trace the choices he’d made in the last decade back to their origin — to remember that Lawrence liked his coffee with milk and two sugars or that Remi kept a collection of murder mysteries she wanted to read but never found the time for or that Robert was always neat and organized to a fault, yet draw a blank over what parts of himself he had fallen back on to play each trait to perfection.
Settling in to sleep two hours before Loid was to start on breakfast, he’d figured it was probably a matter of precaution. To be able to throw away every life he’d lived over the years called for a clean split between the mask and the self, because any flaws in his work that could be traced into a pattern would have meant certain death. If he couldn’t unravel a single thread himself, it only meant he had done a solid job.
He’s nearly shaken away his little dilemma by the time he comes home. Bond lumbers out of Anya’s room while he shucks his coat and hangs it on the rack, slips his sleepy head under his palm and nuzzles his wet nose into his trousers. When Loid looks up, Yor stands in the window of the kitchen, far less frazzled than she had been during the mad dash to herd Anya out the door. She smiles at him, hands clasped to her chest, bright and eager in the way she always is around her family.
“Did you eat?” he asks her, heading to the kitchen to throw together a meal. They had both been too hurried for breakfast; Anya would be sure to land another Tonitrus were she tardy again.
Instead, he finds runny fried eggs and half-charred toast in twin plates on the countertop. The eggs seem cooked through, too, broken yolks aside.
“I wanted to wait,” she says softly, fiddling with her fingers.
Something flutters wildly in his chest — desperate wings beating against a bony cage. It must show on his face, because her cheeks turn pink and her hands start to flit about in that shy way of hers.
“Thank you,” he says, and finds himself wishing he’d whispered it against her cheek with her tucked into his arms. If growing so terribly fond of someone is a poison — and it is, in his line of work — he supposes he’s immune enough to not run from it by now.
They set the table together; she has the day off after a string of nights working overtime, and he has a few hours before his afternoon shift. He slips into the seat beside hers, rare as it is that he gets to, and Yor’s cheeks turn the hue of cherry blossoms again. He barely holds back a smile, at that. In some ways, she’s hardly changed from the day she had first set foot in the apartment, gentle as she has always been to the people she crosses paths with and quick to shy away when she receives more attention than she’s used to.
It strikes him then — he doesn’t know what she was used to before. She’d grown into her place in their little family like she had always belonged with them; she loves Anya as that little girl deserves to be loved, and she is the closest thing he has to a friend. It’s selfish of him — she deserves more for a partner than someone that exists only in a classified dossier or on forged documents.
She makes herself small to allow people around her more comfort often; how much of herself has she left behind for them?
“Yor?” he murmurs, much too soft. She hears him anyway, brilliant and precious when she turns to him. He clears his throat. “Yor,” he tries again, “are you happy here?”
She looks confused for a fleeting moment. “I am,” she says, a joyful twinkle in her eyes. “Of course I am, Loid, I— why do you ask?”
“You were happy before,” he says, but it sounds like a hopeful question he hasn’t finished: Weren’t you? He doesn’t need to know — or rather, he wouldn’t have, six months ago. But he does now. “I can’t imagine your work was any less hectic, but you must have had time to yourself, then. For the places you liked to visit and the things you liked to do.” He gives her a small smile. “Certainly a lot more than you do now.”
She blinks, breathes a soft oh . Her plate is nearly empty; she wipes up the last of the egg with a piece of bread. He waits until her fork clinks in the plate and her hands lower to her lap.
“I didn’t, um…” she starts, quietly. He wonders if he shouldn’t have asked, but then she takes a tiny peek at him. “I worked longer hours, before. My colleagues thought— well, I had to do what I could to blend in with them, and I’d come back to the flat too tired for much more than dinner. I wouldn’t have known where to start, really, if I wanted to find a— a hobby or something of the sort.” She shrugs, looking a bit embarrassed. “I never really gave it much thought.”
It isn’t the kind of answer he’d expected, but it doesn’t quite surprise him. Yor had borne her brother’s world on shoulders far too tiny for the weight until he had grown old enough to find his own way; she’d still measured her every step against a gauge of Yuri’s happiness back when he had run into her at the boutique. If she gazed into a mirror, it would only have been to keep up appearances — it would leave her little time to truly look at who she was, to appreciate what she saw.
These days, though, she moves around the house with a smile on her face and a happy hum in her throat that he can’t quite connect to the reserved woman he’d first met. She buries her face into a pile of fresh laundry in her arms, gently wrestles Bond into submission when he tries to run from his bath, rolls Anya into a blanket and whips it open just to make her daughter scream with laughter as she tumbles onto the bed. She’s grown sure-footed with time; she leaves an undeniably Yor-shaped void in her wake each time she steps out of the house. Her hands had labored ceaselessly for years to build her brother a life he’d be proud to look back on, but now she is sunlight slipping through the cracks in the wall she’d hidden her own wants and needs behind.
He thinks he’d like to chip away at the fissures some more. The rest of him may be an elaborate act, but he owes her something real.
“Would you like to?” he asks.
She blinks. “Would I like to— give it a thought?” Her fingers fiddle with the fabric of her dress. “Maybe? I don’t… I’m never bored, not really.” A lie, if only in part. Loneliness is a cruel thing, and often enough he’s watched her shake it away to greet him when he comes home in the evenings. “You don’t have to worry about me, I promise.”
Loid wants to.
“Winter isn’t too far away,” he says, beginning to smile. Yor draws joy from her family’s company, and from the little things — a squeal of delight and tiny scampering footsteps toward her mother’s stew here, a twirl of a new dress she’d bought her daughter there. “I thought Anya could do with a few new sweaters. I wanted to knit her one, but I’ve never tried my hand at knitting before,” he lies, because he can pretend that it’s the truth well enough. “Would you like to join me?”
Yor’s eyes grow wide, even though he spots a new spark in them. “I’ve never done it before, either,” she mumbles. Her lips twitch into a smile — Anya treasures even the tiniest trinket she receives from the people she loves, and they both know it. But then she fidgets. “I don’t know about this, though, I’m not— Loid, what if I’m no good?”
“Do you want to?” he asks, and she nods with vigor. “Then do it anyway. We can start small.”
Yor curls her hands into fists in her lap, a determined little smile on her face. “Okay,” she says, with one tiny nod. She pumps her fists. “Okay. I can do this!”
He can’t help but grin. The sun has poked a hole in the wall, now, eager to burst free. “I know you can,” he says, and Yor beams in excitement. “Besides,” he adds, jovially, “it’s almost tradition for winter sweaters to be the ugliest things you could ever lay your eyes on.”
A laugh bubbles like music from Yor’s lips; the warmth in Loid’s chest spreads unfettered.
Twilight is better prepared for the next day. Anya is curled up in bed each time he peeks into her room at night to make sure she’s asleep, turned away toward the wall and snuggled deep into her blanket. He can’t see her face when she’s like this, but he doesn’t dare move her. Instead, he takes the couch, scatters his paperwork from the hospital on the coffee table. But as it turns out, Anya breathes calm and restful all night — she even wakes no more than five minutes after he knocks on her door the next morning.
The car ride to school is so full of her little rambles that the silence while he drives to the hospital seems deafening. He tries to pay it no mind. A house call is on the cards for Dr. Forger today, he discovers in the reports stacked on his desk; Twilight slips away to the reconnaissance mission he’s been assigned easily enough. WISE is still short-handed, but he thinks he’d rather take up rookie-level work than be a doctor that didn’t know what was troubling his own daughter.
Barely three hours later, Loid walks the corridor back to his office, an affable smile plastered on his face for the people he passes by. He wonders if he might catch a nap during lunch — he’d spent his two hours tossing and turning the other morning, and last night he hadn’t slept at all — but his hopes begin to crumble at the sight of Nightfall waiting outside his door.
“Ms. Frost,” he says, “how can I help you?”
“You have a message from Eden Academy,” she replies, in a clipped tone of voice. His jaw clenches before Nightfall says another word. After his week in Bayan, he’d requested to be informed immediately of any incident his daughter found herself involved in, no matter how harmless and without regard for how difficult it would be for him to reach her. Waiting until he resumed his cover, he thinks with some annoyance, was far from immediate. “Anya Forger was taken to the infirmary. Her teachers claimed she spent hours asleep at her desk. No demerits will be added to her record — Henry Henderson seems adamant she’s simply ill.”
He says nothing, only turns on his heel and runs. Later, he’d realize he didn’t remember much of the drive between Berlint General and Eden, but he watches over Anya in the rearview mirror once they’ve set out for home.
“Do you feel unwell?” he asks, level and calm. Nothing seems outwardly wrong with her, but she’d mumbled worriedly into his coat about her grades all the way to the car. He couldn’t find it in himself to care for those just then; yet, the less panicked he seems, the more likely she would be to talk. “If something’s wrong, all you have to do is tell me.”
Anya avoids his eyes, burying her chin into her schooldress. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“I’m sorry. I should’ve let you rest,” he says, even as he frowns. She had barely moved all night — her sheets barely ever rustled — and yet—
“I got scary dreams,” she mumbles, her face half hidden in her hands.
His knuckles turn white over the steering wheel. Of course it was that simple. Her nightmares would reduce her to a teary little bundle until not long ago, her sniffles loud enough to reach his ears or Yor’s, but she’d sleep well enough with one of them watching over her. But he supposes nothing remains the same for long. Perhaps she had learned to be quiet, so used to handling her pain on her own that he’d failed to recognize her distress from barely twenty feet away.
“Would you like to take Bond to the dog park with me?” he asks, softly. She could sleep early tonight, he figures, but it was important for her to relax and enjoy herself after braving so much all by herself. “We could get lunch at the cafe nearby, maybe take a trip to the library after your nap. They’re running an event I think you might love.”
Anya’s face is red and her eyes wide when he catches another glimpse of her in the mirror. She must feel embarrassed. “Y–yay,” she recites, staring at him.
His heart twists. “That’s settled, then,” he says, smiling, and she gives him a wobbly little grin of her own.
Yor leaves work early when she receives his message at City Hall, fussing over her daughter the moment she comes home and wrapping her in hugs that make Anya squirm like a hyperactive worm every time they pass each other around the house. They’re done with dinner by seven thirty that evening, and Anya is in her pajamas and sleep-cap by eight, her little face nuzzling happily into Bond’s fur while he stands outside her room waiting to follow her to bed.
She straightens a moment later and turns to him. “Goodnight, pa—”
“Come with me,” he interrupts, before he can stop himself. It’s dangerous, being unable to control his own words, but the risk is worth it when it comes to her. He clears his throat, speaks softer this time around. “You don’t have to do this alone.”
Anya blinks at him, wide eyed. Has he been so distant that a simple offer to be by her side comes to her as such a surprise? Or has he scared her? Perhaps she would be more comfortable with Yor — she’s better at this than he is, anyway.
Anya runs at him and collides with his knee, wrapping her little arms around his leg. “Okay.”
Oh. Okay.
He scoops her up, settling her against his hip. Anya waves her mother goodnight over his shoulder, hums a happy little ditty into his shirt while he brings her to his room and pulls back the sheets and settles her against the pillows. He tells her to wait for him, and she nods hard enough to send her hair flopping over her face. When he returns in his sleepwear, her sleep-cap is nowhere to be seen and she’s flopped over onto her side, doodling invisible shapes into the sheets.
He sits beside her, about to ask what she’d been drawing, but Anya scrambles over to climb into his lap. He sighs, smiles down at her, and scooches back with her in his arms until he’s lay down with her flopped on her belly over his chest.
She kicks up her tiny legs behind her, arms folded under her chin. Her eyes are so bright, still. He wonders: what had she dreamt of? Had she been so afraid of her nightmares that she couldn’t bear to try to sleep again? Had she known he was watching, and turned away from the door so he didn’t have to worry?
Anya buries her face in his shoulder.
“You need to breathe,” he says, rolling onto his side so she slips onto the bed, his arm under her head as a pillow. She watches him, tucking her little hand under her cheek. “There you are. Did you enjoy your day today?”
That makes her smile. Something loosens in his chest and he breathes a little freer. “Yeah!” she beams. “Did you like it, too, Papa? Was your favorite part the library?”
He doesn’t quite know. “I think I liked being at the park best,” he says, ever the pretend-family man. “For a moment I thought Bond would make you play fetch instead.”
She laughs, an odd combination of tinkling bells and a dragon’s snorts. “I loved the park best, too! And— and that time I tried to pull him over to play but he saw a butterfly and ran after it and pulled me behind him too, and you got scared and you ran after me and I was running too but then I was so high in the air and I didn’t even know you’d picked me up so I screamed and— but your ear was right there and your face was all scrunched up like this—” she contorts her own face, looking like she sucked on a lemon— “and you looked so funny !”
His ears feel sore for a second at the memory, but he smiles. He can’t help it. “I looked funny, did I?” he says, poking a finger into her side. She flails, tickled, screeching out a laugh. He doesn’t let up until she starts to wheeze, clutching his finger in a giggly, weak attempt to stall him — all tuckered out and huffy and beaming so wide he thinks he can see the tiniest dimples in her cheeks.
Good. The more tired she is — the happier she is — the better she might sleep.
Anya startles, as if she’d remembered something important. “A-and I liked the library even better!” she says, hurriedly. He almost quirks an eyebrow; she’d completed the treasure hunt in minutes, decided she was bored, and tried to drag him home until he found her a stack of comics to try. “Did you read, too? Whaddya like to read, papa?”
“Their collection of biographies was impressive,” he tells her, easily. Then he thinks he would rather have skimmed some of their old literature.
He frowns. Where did that come from?
Anya’s strangely quiet. She nuzzles his arm, then: “Do you like stories, papa?”
Loid does. It’s a draining line of work, psychiatry, but sometimes it resembles people-watching, except the interactions one witnesses is a hundred moments and incidents and tragedies mingling to create one person and all that makes them who they are.
“I like to see what a person can come up with,” he says instead, pausing to gather his words and filter them down to something simple enough for his daughter. Anya’s eyes, he notices, have never moved from his face despite his silence — patient in a way she’s never been before. “Sometimes, people write stories about what they wish they could have. Some write about what they’ve been through, like they’re taking dirt and mud from their past and growing gardens from it that they’d like to share with other people. You’ll find poems, short stories, novels, plays. Epics that are so much larger than life that you could barely imagine the things they talk about, and yet there is something so human about them that you can’t help but let them sweep you away and bring you back a different person, and—” he blinks, pauses again. Anya drags herself through her reading when there are no pictures involved, and only if she absolutely must; what had he been thinking, allowing himself to run away with his thoughts? “Well. There’s a lot to explore, is what I meant,” he murmurs. “It can be quite interesting.”
Anya is gazing up at him, eyes twinkling like she’d heard every word and understood it and wanted more.
“Oh,” she says, when she realizes he’s done speaking. She curls her fingers into his t-shirt, brows furrowed in contemplation. “If… if you wrote stuff, what would you write?”
He wants to say he doesn’t know, because he doesn’t . What stories does he have to tell about plastic guns and child-sized helmets and smoke and dust and the war and the blood, and enough lies to fill a hundred lifetimes?
Anya curls against his chest, then, a petal of a flowerbud that has yet to see the sun. Her face presses over his heart; he runs a hand over her back, gentle and light, and wonders what stories she might tell a few years down the line.
He wants to listen to them all. He wonders if he’ll be around long enough.
“Poems,” he whispers all of a sudden, enveloping his little girl so close he’s almost nuzzling the crown of her head. Truths are difficult to utter, he’s found, as though he’d run from them for so long they had left him in the end, too. But to weave them into a handful of words, to hide them in plain sight until someone peeled apart the layers like one would a cipher — it tempts him, just a little. “I think I’d like to try my hand at poetry.”
His daughter whips her head back to look at him. Her dimples are pronounced, this time, in a grin more radiant than a full moon.
Heat rushes to his cheeks. Since when is he shy ? “You need to rest,” he says, sternly.
He wants to stay up all night to talk to her, he realizes then. It brings a lump to his throat — he almost doesn’t recognize it, it’s been so long since he’d felt it — so he closes his mouth tight and wraps an arm around his daughter, threading his fingers into her hair and scrunching patterns into it until her eyes droop shut, her exhaustion creeping up on her like the blanket he tucks her into.
He closes his eyes, meaning to stay awake. Minutes later, he drifts asleep.
It becomes something of a routine over the next few nights. Anya begins to bring him her homework all on her own, more out of a rush to be done with it than an urge to digest her lessons. She tries harder than ever at her studies, tiny brows scrunched up in a frown of pure concentration. She sings on her little breaks, making up the words to go with tunes he’s never heard before and doodling creatures that look like amalgamations of at least five different animals. When he calls an end to the evening’s work, she slumps in her chair and sighs loudly in relief like she’d just moved mountains — considering she can barely sit still for more than a minute, she might as well have — and after dinners that shuffle between hamburg steak and chicken in curries textured with crushed peanuts and Yor’s stews, she tugs on his trouser leg, bids goodnight to her mother and her dog, and races him to his own room to hop and jump around on the bed until he tells her to stop.
They talk about nothing and everything. She rambles about her classes, the things she guesses the children around her were thinking — she phrases it strangely, sometimes, as though she’d heard them like one would hear people speak — and how the boys bore her to death and how Becky always makes her laugh.
She tries to be subtle about peppering him with questions, too: if he taught a class, what would he teach? The garden outside her classroom window was full of flowers; which ones were his favorite? She wants to know more than she can remain awake to hear, and soon enough she’s tucked into the crook of his shoulder, fast asleep and carefree, the softest little smile on her face. He hadn’t thought someone could look so blissful even in sleep, but then Anya is everything he can barely imagine in a small, energetic ball of laughter and mischief, fragile as a flame in the wind and beautiful as the light at the end of a long, long tunnel.
He finds it simpler to come up with answers, too, as the days pass — the truthful ones he utters in his mind, that is, that the lies he spins his daughter often nudge him toward. Anya only knows what most other people would corroborate about the man he pretends to be, but he finds many of his own thoughts contradict the answers he gives his daughter out loud. It’s a strange mixture of honesty and deceit that he’s wrapped around her. Sometimes she looks like she knows he’s lying, but there is such joy in her large eyes at the things he tells her that he can never be sure.
It’s also peaceful, in a way he’d never thought it would be. Perhaps it is the satisfaction of solving a difficult problem, or something more raw that he doesn’t quite want to put his finger on yet. He sleeps no more than a few hours each night, keeps watch over a sleeping Anya while he reviews his plans for the next day, wakes her an hour past sunrise, and observes with a secret little smile of his own as she blearily confuses the plants for human beings again.
It is pleasant, and tranquil, and maybe even a touch happy — until it isn’t.
He jolts awake one night, sweat on his brow and not enough air in his lungs. He breathes in smoke and dust. When he looks down at his lap, there is blood on his hands — it takes a few blinks for it to disappear. Nothing remains of his dreams but a gaping void somewhere inside him, like he’s a husk someone had hastily molded to resemble a person. He swallows around nothing, throat scratchy like he’d been screaming. His eyes dart to the pillows beside him before he can think, and— oh , Anya is still asleep, just as she had been before he nodded off.
He sighs, crawls out of bed, tucks the blanket snug and warm around his daughter like an apology.
The house is quiet when he slips into the kitchen. He guesses it’s three in the morning; the wall clock confirms it. The water he sips tastes almost metallic, for a moment, but he finishes the glass and leans against the counter, closing his eyes.
He’s unraveling, he thinks, clinically. He’d spent so long hidden away somewhere he didn’t remember that the tiniest bit of light had managed to lure him into dropping his guard. It isn’t Anya’s fault. It’s no one’s fault but his own. There was a reason he’d steered clear of any string that could tie him to a person, a community, even a country. It had been simple to not want, too, after everything he’d ever touched had turned to dust.
He doesn’t want to feel. He shouldn’t. Could a blade continue to draw blood and destroy lives if it were sentient?
A door clicks to his left. He nearly jumps, his hand behind his back where a gun holster should be and isn’t. But the silhouette against the wall is one he’d recognize anywhere.
“Yor?”
“Loid,” she whispers back. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes,” he lies, almost too quickly. There’s so little strength left in his body that if he runs, he might trip on air. “Go back to sleep, Yor. It’s too early.”
She’s quiet for a moment. He can barely see her face; the moonlight only reaches so far past the window. She tilts her head, the way she does when she’s confused — had he been so transparent that even she refused to believe him? — and then she walks closer.
“Yor?” he asks.
She stops by the counter, leans on it a polite distance from him.
“You don’t have to do this alone, either,” she murmurs.
His throat grows tight.
She says nothing more. They rest beside each other in the kitchen, quiet and content to be so. At some point, he decides he can’t keep her in the dark any longer, murmuring a soft warning before he moves to flick a switch.
Yor blinks until she grows accustomed to the light, gives him a small smile—
“Loid,” she frowns when she sees him. She looks so soft like this, so sorrowful. He wants to kiss away the furrow between her brows. “You look— I’m sorry, I wasn’t going to ask, but—”
“Don’t apologize,” he says. He’s so tired. “I could be better, I suppose.”
Yor purses her lips. He goes to reassure her again, but she shuffles closer until their arms brush lightly together. It might be the nightmares, or perhaps he’s reading too deeply into a simple touch, but— in that moment, he isn’t alone. Nor is the person by his side worried about a mere mask.
He finds it easier to talk, this time. He’s had days of practice.
“Yor,” he whispers, and senses her gaze on him in an instant. “Do you ever wonder what it would be like if things were— different?”
“Different,” she repeats, softly. “I… yes, sometimes.”
He affects a smile for her sake. “I like to think that some things would remain the same,” he says. He doesn’t name them — not the little girl snoring in his room, nor Yor herself. He’s said and thought and wanted far too much already. “It’s a pointless exercise, though, I suppose. The damage is done.”
“No,” she says, shaking her head, gazing at him. “It isn’t. It’s painful, sometimes— well, at least it is when I think about my mother, or things of that nature. I wonder what she would have thought of me after all this—?” She bites her lip, letting out a breath. Then she smiles, small and sad. “I know we could hardly grieve what we lost, you and I and other people our age — we were too busy just trying to make it to the next day. But I think, even if it hurts, and even if it seems pointless, or— or silly, it might be another way we hold onto hope.” She rubs her arm, her head bowed. “Nothing unrealistic, just… a sort of fuel, that we may build a better world for whoever has to face it next. That— that Anya doesn’t have to ask herself the same questions we do, or—” she huffs a tiny, tremulous little laugh —“that she doesn’t find herself in the kitchen in the middle of the night unless she just really wants a bowl of ice-cream.”
If she knows he’s gazing at her — and she always does — she doesn’t show it. She’s quiet, even when he touches her hand, weaves their fingers together in the firmest grip he can muster.
“You’re right,” he murmurs. She does move, then, peeking at him through her bangs, her cheeks and nose a touch pink. None of the things she’s said feels like a lie — not because of her words, but because of who she might be saying them to. He wants to hope that she sees through him — that it’s him she’s talking to, the stranger Anya has dragged out of nowhere all by herself without knowing it. He doesn’t know why he wants that.
“If that’s what it is, this longing for what could have been,” he goes on, “then I hope Anya never forgets who she is.” He almost falters, and Yor’s eyes widen a bit before he manages to smile again. “I hope you find every happiness in the world, too, Yor. You more than deserve it.”
Her face is upturned, now, her eyes large and restless. Her gaze skitters over his face.
“Do you remember? Who you used to be, I mean.”
“Somewhat,” he says. It isn’t a lie. “Do you?”
Yor looks at their hands, places her other hand around their knuckles. She tugs, just a little; he goes easily, wraps an arm around her shoulders, tucks her chin over her head. His eyes slip shut on their own, as though she is the one wrapping him in warmth.
“I’m starting to,” she says. He hears her smile in her voice.
It is high time for some damage control, he decides. He’s methodical about it from the moment he wakes Anya that morning until she stands before him by the school gates. She blinks at him like he’s a puzzle she can’t figure out just yet, but he only reminds himself it’s a matter of falling back into a decade-old habit he’d abandoned for a week.
The thought sits bitter at the back of his tongue. It isn’t a betrayal to run from the things his daughter had unearthed in her little evening interrogations — and even if it is, what does it matter? He’s betrayed everyone he’s ever met before, anyway. Besides, Anya and Yor having to make do with a cardboard cutout for a father and husband is a bigger breach of faith than anything else. It’s the way things are, and the way they must be until the end. It doesn’t bother him.
It doesn’t.
His desk is piled with his patients’ folders, as it always is. He prepares for an undercover assignment next week in Municht — he thinks he needs to prepare Anya, too, for a week of homework and sleep on her own, and then he backtracks and decides to ask Yor to help her instead; he must remain unattached — and scans details of another handful of missions slated for the day and the rest of the week. Strix is still top priority, however — Anya’s home by four, and he needs to be home by five to allow her rest before they take on her books.
So he is. He feels worse for the wear, walking up the stairs to their flat; clearly there are chinks in his armor that he cannot afford even though they look like a child’s tiny handprints. It’s a challenge, caring for Anya the way she needs to be yet remaining invulnerable enough to make a clean break the moment he’s asked — but then he’s always faced challenges head-on, even though his feet seem glued to the ground now that he needs to try.
He shakes his head and unlocks the door and—
“Happy Papa’s Day, Papa!” Anya squeals, waiting by the umbrellas nearby. She’s tipped her head back all the way to look him in the eyes. She wears a pink birthday hat and holds a matching hat in her hands, just bigger. There are those dimples in her little cheeks again — he wishes he could reach out and poke his pinkie into them just to make her giggle—
Wait. Focus . “Papa’s day?” he asks, mildly puzzled, even as Anya giggles and giggles in pure delight. “Father’s day is a Sunday in June, Anya. This is September.”
“She wanted to celebrate a second one,” Yor supplies, beaming, a— gift-wrapped box in her arms? She’s known for a while, then. Anya does like to recruit her as a co-conspirator often enough.
“I see,” he says. He doesn’t, but Anya is happy and that’s what matters. He crouches before his daughter, smiling. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”
Anya quickly slaps the birthday hat she’d been holding onto his head — or tries to, because it ends up on his nose. He takes it from her and puts it on. It’s best to humor her, of course.
“Get up, get—” Anya latches onto his fingers with both hands and tugs with all her might. When he stands, she pretends she’s dragging him to the dinner table. She rambles with all the breath in her tiny lungs. “We made you cake! We— I mean, mama and I! Bond tried to eat the crumbly bits but I didn’t let’ im. Is raspberry bad for dogs? I donno, but I wanna eat some cake and I can’t eat it until you do. Want a candle?”
“Those are usually for birthdays,” he says, peering at the shapeless mass resting on a plate at the table’s center, with a fork and a knife placed neatly beside it. It doesn’t seem all that bad, when he takes a closer look. A layer of char coats the outer surface, and when he cuts it open — Anya squealing and clapping her tiny hands the moment he does — all but the middle seems edible.
“It’s raspberry and white chocolate!” she announces, hands on her hips.
When she’d asked, doodling shapes on his cheek one night, he told her citrus cakes were his favorite. He does remember recalling the first time he had baked a cake on his own, right after he’d lied: nineteen years old and fresh out of culinary training for a mission, alone in a tiny flat he usually only slept in. Maybe Anya had forgotten what he’d said and picked a random recipe. It was a simple coincidence — not too big of a deal.
He carves a careful slice and nibbles at it. It’s damp, dense, and brittle in his mouth.
He thinks — a tiny allowance, just to himself — that it might be the best cake he’s ever eaten.
Anya screams all of a sudden, bursting into a gleeful little run around a giggly Yor and a sleepy Bond and each piece of furniture in the living area. “Oh—!” she yells halfway around the coffee table, then jumps and rushes to her room, emerging again with something bright and red in her hands.
He watches her, puzzled. She swings her arm wildly in a gesture that probably means she wants him to get down again, so he obeys.
Quickly, she sticks a flower over his ear — a red carnation, he recognizes from the blur past the corner of his eye. “There,” she says, like pint-sized royalty, and then she adds on, “your favorite!”
His— what?
“Um,” Yor says, standing by his usual armchair. Anya whirls around suddenly, giving Bond a wide-eyed look, then suddenly runs into her room. He wonders if she’d forgotten something else, but then Yor fidgets, lowering her gaze. “I—it’s nothing much, but I wanted to…” she trails off, cheeks red. She takes two measured steps and thrusts the gift box at him. “For you!”
“Oh,” he says, taking off his hat before he picks at the tape, “what’s this?”
She waits until he opens the box. Inside, unadorned and pretty, is a simple rust-orange scarf, neat and even and terribly soft to the touch when he takes it into his hands.
“You said we could start small,” she murmurs. “I started small.”
He stares at the scarf.
“I’m— I’m sorry,” he hears. “It’s nothing special and I wanted to make you something better but I— it took me a few tries to get a hang of this and— you don’t have to keep it, Loid— you—”
“Yor,” he breathes, tearing his gaze away to look at her. She is nearly red in the face and her hands tremble and her eyes shift from one spot on the floor to another. It’s almost sacred, this beautiful thing in his hands, this little garment she’s woven her own warmth into. The first thing she finished when she picked up something new, and she’d given it to him .
“It’s perfect,” he says. He takes a deeper breath, gathers his courage. A step, and he’s as close as they had been mere hours ago, curled against each other, swaying to music no one could hear. “Yor,” he says again, because she’s sacred, too. “Would you like to—”
“Oh!” she gasps, blinking at him. A smile curls her lips upward, fills her eyes with light. “Y–yes— here,” she says, reaching out to him; her fingers brush his as she takes the scarf from him, but she only smiles wider and gently drapes it around his neck, one end loose over his chest.
“Oh,” she says again. She’s looking up at him again, he finds when he looks away from her hands, and she says, shyly: “Beautiful.”
Just this once , he thinks. Begs, prays — wants. Please — just this once.
It’s simpler than anything else, he finds, to rest his hand on her jaw, brush her thumb over her cheek. To lean forward, watch her eyes flutter closed, her lashes against the tender pink of her skin, and press his lips — gentle, trembling — to the corner of her mouth.
She draws a sharp breath. He starts to pull away, newly worried, but—
Yor’s hands cup his face; he stills, her breath warm on his skin. She rises on her toes, tilts her head, and kisses him.
It is chaste, ephemeral — it is the sweetest thing in the world.
She looks— happy , when he opens his eyes. A little bit of sun he’s dared to hold in his arms. He’d wondered, last night, when she looked at him: which him did she see?
“Loid,” she whispers, and smiles the way she always has, and for a horrible, beautiful moment, it doesn’t feel like a stranger’s name at all.
He smiles, too, lowering his head to touch her forehead with his—
Anya’s door flies open with a bang against her wall. “Is the kissy-kissy over yet?” she screeches, even though he hears her grin in her voice.
Yor jumps away with an alarmed squeak, red as her eyes all the way to her shoulders, but Loid rolls his eyes and turns to his daughter. She runs out with a card badly hidden behind her back and plants herself in front of him.
“I wonder what you’ve got there,” he says, dryly.
“It isn't a boring old card,” she tells him, deeply offended. Her eyes twinkle with mischief the next instant. “You gotta pick me up to get it!”
“Right,” he acquiesces. Yor settles against the armchair again, watching as he hooks his hands under her arms and swings her up to settle her against his chest. “There. What is it?”
Anya flattens the card against his shoulder, uses the support to raise herself in his arms to whisper into his ear. She doesn’t usually find much success whispering — the last time she’d tried, a child on the other side of the classroom had heard her and laughed. He leans in to listen anyway.
“Happy birthday, Papa,” she whispers, so quietly he isn’t sure he’d heard.
When he realizes he had, the air leaves his lungs.
She’d forgotten again — of course. He forces in a breath, steady. “That’s not until—”
“Happy birthday,” she says again. This time, her little arms wrap around his neck in a hug. Her voice— breath? — almost trembles, like she’s nervous. “I love you, papa.”
“Anya?” he calls, softly, peeling her off him to look at her. She seems sure, somehow, even though she doesn’t meet his eyes. She couldn’t— no one knew—
“You told me,” she mumbles, picking at her arm. He covers her tiny hand with his, keeps it over his own cheek. “You told me, papa. When I asked.”
A week ago. She’d never asked after that one time. He had never said it out loud, only thought—
“September two,” she whispers, and he thinks about the raspberry and white chocolate cake, and the carnation in his hair that reminds him of Yor’s eyes, and he understands all at once: she knows.
He should run, he thinks. But he sees her, then — his little girl, trembling like a leaf in his arms, red-faced and misty eyed.
His daughter — a little liar.
Anya, he thinks, far softer than he has the right to — the kindest liar he’d ever met.
She snaps to attention, gazing at him almost in wonder. “Papa?”
This is the worst possible response someone like him could have, but he lets himself anyway. He smiles, gathers her close, brushes her bangs aside to press a kiss to her forehead.
“Do you know,” he murmurs against her hair, pulling her closer to kiss the crown of her head, “what my favorite part of the day was?”
She sniffles, loud and wet. Her face tucks into the crook of his neck. “No,” she says. “I din’ hear.”
“You,” he tells her, truthfully. Like reaching into clear water and pulling out a pearl she had put there herself: I love you. I love you. I love you. “It was always you.”
Anya shakes with a happy sob and lunges at his neck to hug him again, and she laughs, and Yor smiles, and Bond borfs — and for the first time in years, he’s home.