Chapter Text
The Forger family life doesn’t implode after the night Yor came home bloody and injured. It shifts a bit, then resettles, different but not necessarily worse for the wear, at least not on the surface.
Twilight does his best with what he knows, and doesn’t ask when Yor makes a quiet phone call the day after, her right arm still imobile under the white bandages.
He helps her redress the wound, brings her tea and painkillers when the pain keeps her up at night. He calls her workplace for her, makes excuses, covers her tracks.
They go with the mugging story, and everyone he tries to sell it to buys it with a rush of concerned platitudes and fervent well wishes. He plays the part of the worried husband to perfection, basking in the sympathies that conveniently help to strengthen the Forger family image. No one could suspect them of being a fake family, not after this touching display of care and support.
He says as much to Handler, and hopes that she doesn’t probe him on the circumstances of Yor’s injury. Miraculously, she doesn’t. He frames it as a win for Operation Strix, and goes home with Handler’s well wishes for Yor and that odd half-peace half-anxiety that seems to haunt him these days.
Anya is subdued and tearful when she first sees the bandages, crying into her mama’s lap. The sorrow morphs into determination, and she declares herself Mama’s personal injury-assistant, running up and down the halls with all manner of trinkets to help her feel better soon. His heart swells traitorously when he finds them asleep together on the couch one evening, Anya’s head on Yor’s lap, Agent Penguin serving as support for Yor’s injured arm, the picture of peace. His own, selfishly personal peace.
For the sake of the wider, perhaps more important peace, he still makes sure Anya goes to school and keeps up with her work, even though she’s still rather forlorn about it. He can’t bring himself to push her to do her homework the way he usually does, but she does it diligently herself, somberly, like she’s doing her best to live up to her role in the family. He catches her looking between him and Yor contemplatively more than once, like she knows something has changed.
He isn’t sure what exactly has changed. Everything, and yet nothing. Something that makes it easier to act on the urge to touch Yor, to let his hands linger, light and careful, indulgent. Something that makes her okay with that. Something that makes him lie awake at night, thinking, wondering. Something that made him follow Yor to work from afar for one uneventful day, before going home, burning with an odd sense of shame.
If Handler notices that he’s in more of a hurry to get home these days, she doesn’t say anything about it.
Yor gets better. He fusses anyway, the image of her sitting pale and bloody in the light of her bedside lamp is still fresh in his mind. She relents to his worry with quiet but hesitant understanding. It’s subtle, but she sometimes seems reluctant to fully accept being cared for. It only makes him fuss more. He has to make sure she's alright. For the mission.
She’s regaining her strength at an incredible pace, and it only takes a week or two for her to take back her tea making duties, almost by force. She seems happier for it, and he can’t say he doesn’t understand the resentment of the helplessness that injury tends to bring.
Handler mentions off hand that one of their operatives is going into hiding following the discovery that one of his secret government contacts had been covertly assassinated a few weeks ago. Twilight wonders. But he doesn’t ask.
--
A month has reduced the wound on Yor’s shoulder into a small puckered scar, barely there and yet still so present in his mind that it catches his eye more often than he’d like.
They haven’t talked about her secret, not since that night, but it sits beneath the surface of their interactions, suspended, unspoken. Twilight doesn’t ask. But time has made him restless, and he considers asking Franky to keep an eye out.
Yor comes home one evening with pain in her stance, grimacing as she sets down her bag. She tries to hide it, plastering on a smile and making tea in silence.
He decides to wait until Anya goes to bed to address it. She goes more willingly than usual, giving him a supportive look as he tucks her in, like she knows how his heart is racing with fear and expectation.
Yor tries to deflect, eyes downcast and nervous, but he pries gently until she shows him the bruising, purple and painful across the side of her torso.
“I fell,” she says, before he can ask. “I misjudged a distance.” She doesn’t seem to be lying, but she doesn’t expand on the statement, mouth drawn into a tight line as he presses ice to her side. She doesn’t flinch as his fingers brush across her skin when he wraps a bandage around her, just tight enough to apply the necessary amount of compression to mitigate the swelling.
It’s different from the first time he’d had to treat her, in that he’s not as caught off guard, and Yor is clear headed and able to take in the worry that makes its home on his face against his will. It’s different in that they’re both painfully aware of all that remains unspoken, tentatively held there by that trust he should know better than to indulge.
He settles onto the couch next to Yor, and she wordlessly rests her head on his shoulder, letting out a small sigh of contentment. Usually their evenings are filled with idle but pleasant talk, but today they sit in silence, and his thoughts race with all the things he wants to and will not and should ask.
He wonders, not for the first time, if he’s lost his mind. This blind-spot exists in violation of every principle he’s drilled into his being since the day he’d become Twilight. But he’s slipping into the cracks between Loid Forger and Twilight, and increasingly he finds that those principles can be bent and molded to account for this. To account for her.
Something internal tells him that he’s playing a dangerous game, and he silences it, perhaps foolishly. But this can only benefit his mission in the long run. By making sure Yor feels comfortable with him he increases their connection as a (fake) couple, enhancing the image of a perfect family that is so crucial to Operation Strix. The excuse rings hollow in his ears, but he clings to it anyway.
‘I’ll tell you when the time is right,’ she’d said. He wonders when that will be.
The next day, Handler tells him that the finance minister’s accountant they had been looking into as a possible contact has been assassinated. He’d been a prime target for information gathering, because they had corruption related dirt on him, and he wasn’t so prominent that any odd behaviour would be too noticeable. It’s a shame, but not a huge loss. They’re unsure who carried out the hit. Handler doesn’t go into any more details, and he doesn’t ask.
But he thinks about the bruises that bloomed across Yor’s skin, and he thinks that perhaps he knows anyway.
--
It’s almost midnight when Yor comes home. He waited up for her, long after Anya reluctantly allowed herself to be tucked in for bed.
She comes in quietly, shutting the door gently behind her. He wonders how many times she’s done it before, silently coming and going in the dead of night, barely casting a shadow or making a sound.
“Welcome home,” he says, standing up as she enters the living room. She gives him a small, tired smile. She seems uninjured, as far as he can see, but her face is drawn and tense. “Are you alright?” he asks.
Yor lets out a quiet sigh. “Yeah,” she says, setting down her bag and stepping towards him. “Just tired.”
Twilight nods in understanding. “I know how you feel,” he says. “Late night work tends to do that to you.” He tries to keep his tone lighthearted, to cheer her up a bit. Yor flashes a small smile.
“You didn’t have to wait up for me,” she says. “I know you’re busy, and rest is important.”
“I don’t mind doing it,” he replies. “I sleep better when I know you’re alright.” It’s a half truth. Decades of tense, wary nights have left his sleep fragmented at best, but the knowledge that Yor is unharmed is a welcome spot of light in the darkness of a sleepless night.
Yor blinks at him for a moment, contemplative, with an intensity to her gaze. Then she averts her eyes, biting her lip and looking conflicted.
“Loid, I-” she starts, then stops, like the words had gotten stuck on the way out.
He moves to stand in front of her, searching her face. There's a mix of emotions in her eyes, sadness battling with frustration and something else. She opens her mouth, as if to continue, but then closes it again, ducking her head with a sigh.
“Yor?” he says, questioningly. Something is clearly bothering her. And he knows better than anyone that injuries aren’t always physical.
“I…” Yor says, and trails off, shoulders slumping. For a moment the air is heavy with her exhaustion, and then suddenly she’s hugging him, throwing her arms around his torso and leaning into his warmth.
He stands frozen for a moment, then wordlessly and instinctively brings his arms up to wrap around her, holding her closer.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks, gently. He feels her shake her head.
“Can we just stay like this for a bit?” she says, and her voice is barely above a whisper, but it makes his heart ache in ways he hadn’t known were possible.
“We can stay like this as long as you want to,” he murmurs into her hair, tightening his hold around her and savouring the feeling of how she relaxes against him. It’s comfortable and warm, and he can’t bring himself to dwell on how dangerous it is to have his guard down like this.
There’s a rush that comes with the danger of it all. He doesn’t know who she moonlights as, or what she spends these late nights doing. But it makes her similar to him in a way no one has ever been. They’re united by the unspoken, by the shared act of not knowing. By the scars that litter their skin, and the battle wounds tended to in the dark of night. It’s terrifying, risky.
He holds her until she makes a move to step away, arms still half wrapped around him. Her gaze is soft and tender as she looks up at him, and for a moment he loses the awareness of who he is and what’s at stake in those endless pools of red. They stand there for a moment, taking each other in.
“Thank you, Loid,” Yor says, and while her face has gone a familiar shade of red, there’s a peace in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. “Good night.”
He nods, flashing her a warm smile, and watches as she heads to her room, casting a few glances back at him. He stands there for a moment, trying to justify the light feeling in his chest in the context of the mission. He finds that he can't. Objectively, there is no benefit to him growing ever more attached to Yor. It's worryingly difficult to hold back.
--
Handler gives him more side missions. He completes them, taking extra care to avoid injury. The Forger family goes on outings. Yor smiles, Anya laughs. For a brief flash of time, Twilight and Loid combine into someone who smiles and laughs back.
--
She comes home with cuts all over her hands, this time. It reminds him of the times she’d come home with bandaids half covering the red lines all over her fingers after her cooking classes.
She watches him with a somber, almost melancholy gaze as he goes to get the first aid kit. They sit on the couch, and he unpacks it onto the table. Silently, Anya is sleeping. Yor doesn’t flinch or wince at the sting of the antiseptic, eyes fixed on his hands as he bandages each cut till her hands are half hidden in white. His fingers linger even when the last cut is carefully covered, gently holding on to her hand. She returns the hold despite her injuries, just as gently.
“I’m sorry,” she says, quietly. This time she meets his eyes as she says it. Her eyes are depths of conflicted red, and he doesn’t try to look away.
“Don’t be,” he replies, simply. “It’s okay.” He runs his thumb carefully across the back of her hand, then lifts it to his lips, pressing a chaste kiss to it. Yor’s eyes stay fixed on him, brimming with emotion.
They sit like that for a moment, hand in hand, a reflection of the silent moment they’d shared that night that seems so long ago now.
Like always, he doesn’t ask. But this time, Yor answers anyway.
“They were making dangerous weapons,” she says, suddenly. “Explosives. They threw one at me, and I caught it. But it cut me before I could throw it back.” She stares at her hands, eyes roaming over the carefully placed bandages.
A thousand different responses flit through his mind in less than a second, but he voices none of them. Instead, he takes her other hand into his, gently, feeling the coarse rub of the bandages against his skin. Interrogative techniques spring to his mind out of habit, but he ignores them. He cannot rush this. For the sake of Yor's trust in him, he refuses to. For the mission, yes. But also for the small part of himself that genuinely, honestly relishes the thought that, even if it’ll only be for as long as he gets to be Loid Forger, Yor trusts him.
Yor looks from her hands to him, then back to her hands. When she looks up again, there’s a resolve in her eyes.
“Loid,” she says, softly. “I want to tell you something.”
His heart leaps into his throat, and he nods.
“You can tell me anything, Yor,” he says, trying his best not to let the sudden anxiety that spikes in his chest cause his voice to wobble. This could be it, the confession that threatens to topple over the stack of precariously balanced rationalizations he’s been using to excuse his uncharacteristically risky choice to remain in the dark for so long.
“I’m an assassin,” Yor says, eyes not leaving his face, expression nervous but decided all at once. “They… they call me the Thorn Princess.
An assassin, the Thorn Princess. For the first time since Yor came home with that gunshot wound, he feels like he can finally connect the dots like the master of intelligence that he’s supposed to be. His mind races, calculating and rationalizing.
He can work with this. He has never heard of a Thorn Princess, so his assumption that she is not a direct enemy of WISE is all but confirmed. Thus, Yor being an assassin does not mean she can’t be his wife and Anya’s mother. She’s already shown herself capable of filling both roles, even while moonlighting as a contract killer. He’s almost impressed.
And if anything, accepting her secret would be the ultimate sign of trust, cementing her view of him as someone she can rely on through anything.
There’s so much risk those rationalizations don't cover. But, for reasons he’s admittedly increasingly aware of these days, he’s desperate to find mission appropriate ways to justify how much he’s willing to overlook if it means that she doesn’t have to leave.
After all, it’s true that Yor leaving would set Operation Strix back by months. It could even destroy it completely. Having to find a new wife after such a short second marriage would be hellishly difficult, not to mention the damage it would deal to the all important Forger family reputation. Also, Anya would be inconsolable, and that would definitely negatively impact Operation Strix. He'd probably have to start again from scratch.
But it was incredibly lucky that he met Yor, and that she was willing to accept their arrangement so quickly. It’s unlikely he could be that lucky a second time, even though this time it turns out that she’s secretly an assassin.
It’s for all those reasons, and not because of the ache in his chest when he thinks of a life without Yor, that he shuts off the part of his brain that screams that this is the worst idea he’s ever had as a spy and gives her his most reassuring smile.
“Thanks for telling me,” he says, and watches as Yor’s shoulders sink, releasing tension he hadn’t even noticed was there.
“You’re not angry?” she asks, tentatively. “If it’s too much I can leav-”
“No,” Twilight says, perhaps more strongly than he’d intended. “No, I- I’m not angry.”
Yor watches him warily as he tries to find words to fill the growing silence.
“How long have you been an assassin for?” he asks, eventually, partly to fill the silence and partly because he’d genuinely like to know.
Yor looks down, eyes far away but soft.
“I started when I was a child,” she says, and his breath catches in his throat. “After our parents died I had to support Yuri, and that was the only way I could.”
He’s struck with the thought that they’re a lot more alike than he could ever have imagined. A rough childhood is not something he’d wish on anyone, but there’s something intimate about the closeness of shared tragedy, of mirrored catastrophes so far apart and yet so similar.
“I admire that,” he says. “The courage to persevere through something difficult for the sake of a loved one.” He’s said it before. He means it now more than ever.
Yor’s eyes are brimming with emotion when she looks back up at him.
“Loid I- you don’t know how much I value you saying that.” Her voice is thick with tears, but there’s a lightness to it that sets his heart fluttering with an odd mix of happiness and guilt.
“I mean it,” he murmurs, despite himself. He had meant it the first time he said it as well, but the depth of emotion swirling in his chest this time is so strong that it knocks him off guard in a way that disorientation from an injury never could.
Yor shuts her eyes, leaning over until her head is resting on his shoulder. She keeps hold of one of his hands, and he shifts so that she’s comfortable.
“Thank you,” she says, quietly, and he feels like his heart is about to burst out of his chest.
Briefly he wonders if it’s normal for a civilian to react to the news that their spouse is an assassin like this. Probably not. But Yor doesn’t seem to find anything strange in his acceptance, so he lets the thought go, honing in on the feeling of her warmth at his side.
“Why,” he asks, quietly, like he’s afraid the moment will shatter if he speaks too loudly. “Why do you keep doing it? Despite the risks? Even though you don’t have to support Yuri anymore?”
Yor is silent for a long moment.
“To protect the peace,” she replies, just as quietly, like she’s afraid the words will be heard. “To protect the world you and Anya live in, to protect your smiles, your happiness. For my family.”
For peace. For a world where their child doesn’t have to cry. Her family. A lump settles in Twilight’s throat, impossible to speak around. Her family. The words ring in his head, and he almost wants to cry. Differently to him, there’s nothing stopping Yor from seeing this as her family. In fact, it’s good for him, for his mission, if she does.
And yet the thought of it fills him with an inseparable tangle of joy and bone-deep guilt. It’s terribly unfair, he thinks, for this to exist under the conditions it does, with the background of lies and manipulation that he founded it on. It’s also terribly selfish for him to feel a burst of warmth at the words. She does it for them. Her family. Their family. His-
He cuts the thought off before it can fully form. Breathing deeply, he tries to clear his mind, scrambling for the most productive response to make.
“I’m sorry if this is too bold of me,” Yor says quietly, from his side. “I just.. I felt it was too important not to say.”
“It’s alright,” he says, idly caressing her hand with his thumb, still trying to find the right words to respond with.
“I’m glad you told me,” he says, and he hates how genuine it is, in affront to all the careful neutrality that should never have allowed any of this to happen. “I’m… I’m really touched that you care about us enough to put yourself in such danger.”
“The two of you are the best thing to ever happen to me,” Yor says, simply, as if it’s a fact of life, like the colour of the sky or the warmth of the sun. “It’s worth it.”
Twilight is silent for a long moment.
“Thank you,” is all he manages to say in the end, because he’s a coward, and the feelings that he’d usually fake in a situation like this are beginning to feel concerningly real.
He feels Yor nod in response. He doesn’t trust himself to say anything more, so they sit in silence until exhaustion drives them back to their rooms.
Yor smiles softly, gratefully, at him as she disappears through her door. Loid smiles back. Twilight doesn’t sleep at all that night.