Chapter Text
Panic rushed through Twilight’s mind, but relief through his body. A decade of lies and deceit suddenly had a mere ounce removed from its weight and yet it was nothing short of heavenly. Despite that physical euphoria, his mind couldn’t believe his foolishness. Though this deception might still be salvageable, he had just revealed something that could easily get him killed in a multitude of ways. If Yuri Briar were to catch wind of this secret, Loid would be under heavy scrutiny. If every day citizens were to catch wind of it, he might be beaten or lynched considering the current sentiment of Westalis. Even if nothing were to threaten him physically, the mission was in the most danger. If Eden College were to find out, they may very well kick Anya out of school, or if Desmond himself were to find out he might go underground.
His throat seized up, now terrified that he’d dig his grave even deeper.
‘I need to talk! I need to fix this ASAP!’
Twilight looked up and saw Yor with a much less shocked expression than he’d have expected from his revelation.
‘Did she suspect as much? If so, for how long? And how? I need to tread carefully! I’m already on the thinnest ice I’ve ever stumbled on to. I can’t afford to mess up!’
Yor’s fractionally agape mouth closed, her half raised brows lowered. Patiently, she waited for him to continue.
‘Thank God… I might salvage this yet. But what do I…’
A sudden realization dawned on the senior agent. Yor seemed willing to listen—what’s more, while shocked, she didn’t seem to show much care at the idea of him being from Westalis. This might be his one opportunity to tell someone—to tell her—the truth. The temptation was so sweet that screaming at himself was all he could do to resist.
‘You said it yourself, Twilight. How many times have you forgotten that your name isn’t Loid Forger? That you aren’t married or a father to anyone? You’ve indulged yourself enough. Now straighten up and do what’s right.’
That nagging voice in his head spoke sense. He knew it. He knew what he had to do.
‘But I don’t care anymore. I don’t want to be Twilight. I don’t want to be a spy or to be Loid Forger anymore. I want to leave that damn battlefield once and for all! I want to come home everyday to my family! To my wife and daughter! I want everything this damn war took from me! I’ve given enough! I’ve done enough! I deserve this!’
For the first time in a long time, his mind stilled. There was no monologue that lectured on what he should be doing or how the situation was unfolding. Total quiet, as if it had all left with a handful of tears. It was the most blissful thing he’d experienced in years.
He took a breath and began.
“Have you… Have you ever heard of a place called Luwen?”
Sheepishly, Yor shook her head, her face turned down towards the table, save for her eyes that looked up at him.
“It was one of the inciting attacks of the second war between the East and West. In the West, people believed wholeheartedly that Ostania had broken the fragile peace and murdered innocents. The official narrative in the East was that Westalis or another nation commenced a false flag operation in order to ignite a second war. Neither really matters to me. I only now consider that day to be the one where my home was destroyed.”
Yor looked up and gasped, covering her mouth in horror. “You mean—”
“—Yes. Luwen is where I was born. And I remember that day more clearly than any other. I remember it more often than any other.”
Yor reached across the table to grab hold of Twilight’s hand, but he instinctively recoiled back, hissing through his teeth like her touch was fire.
“I… I’m sorry…”
“No.” he said, reaching to where she left her hand and grabbing hold of it. “It’s not your fault. It’s mine. I’m not used to… to being open like this.”
Yor’s lips upturned so minorly that Twilight wouldn’t have confidently called it a smile if he hadn’t heard her tone. “A psychiatrist who isn’t open with his feelings? That’s a little ironic, no?”
Twilight couldn’t help but smile at that. Not at the irony—but instead at Yor. Her voice was practically that of a siren’s. That beautiful smile squeezed even more tears from him as his chest twisted tight.
He shook the thought from his mind and wiped his tears. “The first bomb that dropped that day was in a warehouse that my friends and I used to play in. I watched it blow up only minutes after I had left. To the best of my knowledge, my friends were still inside when it happened. Afterwards, a bomb dropped practically in front of me. To this day I don’t know how I survived. The shockwave alone should have killed me. The old woman who ran the croquette shop I had been standing next to… wasn’t so lucky. The store has collapsed on top of her. If nothing else, I can assume it was painless.”
While Twilight explained, Yor’s face was pained, and yet she stayed quiet. She didn’t interrupt him for even a moment. The only thing she did was grasp onto Loid’s hand tighter.
“My mother found me not long after the bombs began dropping and we escaped to the nearby city of Kielburg where my mother’s uncle lived.”
For the first time since he began, tears began welling up in Twilight’s eyes. Though one or two had escaped previously, these well and truly choked the breath in his throat. His nose stuffed up and he was forced to gasp through his mouth in an attempt to control himself.
“My father… I never saw him again.”
“Loid—”
“—I lied to him.” He interrupted her. “The very last thing I told my father was a lie.”
As a means of providing funds for a potential war, the government sold toy soldier sets which came with a helmet and fake rifle. While all of Twilight's friends had one, his father refused to buy one for him. He rejected the premise of the war—rejected the propaganda that Westalis so fervently pushed.
“Only a few days before the bombing, I told my father how my friends and I planned to enlist when we came of age. He struck me and called me a coward, telling me that I should hope for peace, not war. I retreated to my room and he began fighting with my mother when she tried defending me. A few days later, my father needed to leave on a business trip. I had grown frustrated with the bullying of my friends who made fun of me for not having the toy set that we valued so greatly. So I lied to my father saying that I needed the money for school books. The smile on his face when he heard that… to this day is like a dagger twisting through my heart. Without a second thought, he handed me the money, and promised to take me to the town fair when he returned. That night, dinner tasted like ash in my mouth… Truth be told, I still taste that ash sometimes.”
“You’re father… Was he very abusive?”
Twilight truly didn’t know the answer to that question. The man was by no means gentle, but seeing that smile in his memories… Recalling his fathers words as he was chastised for planning to fight in the war…
“I think my father loved me more than words can do justice. I think he struggled to explain his worldview in a way that a child would understand and adopt. I think… I think he deserved a better son.”
Twilight went on to explain how Kielburg was bombed not long after, and how his mother didn’t make it into the shelter in time—about how he escaped the shelter just before it closed in order to go and find her—about how he lost the remainder of what he possessed that very day.
Hatred infected Twilight in the coming years. The Ostanians had taken everything from him, leaving him in a world with nothing except that which he hated. It was reason enough to pick up a gun. Using the identity of an older boy from Luwen who died in the bombings, Twilight managed to sneak his way into the military at an early age and swiftly climb the ranks to sergeant,
While on patrol one night, he came across an Ostanian deserter with large hair, and a penchant for talking more than was welcome.
“Wait a minute, you don’t mean Frankie, do you?”
“The very same,” Loid nodded, a ghost of a smile etched on his features. Small as it was, it radiated a sort of nostalgia.. “I was ready to kill him, but he just burst into tears, begging me to spare him. Something in me just softened and I offered him a cigarette as a last meal of sorts, though I don’t know if he fully understood that I was still planning on killing him at the time.”
“So that’s why he told me to give you his thanks for a cigarette!”
Twilight nodded, the smile fading from his face. “He began talking about the war, about how it was all a bunch of rich and powerful elites sending people like us to die. Blinded by rage and flashes of what happened to me, I snapped, kicking him down and telling him that this war was nothing more than my people justly defending ourselves from the Ostanians. My shouting got the attention of the Ostanian soldiers who had been chasing after Franky, and as a result, he escaped and I was injured.”
“Injured?” Yor half jumped in her seat. “Was it bad?”
“Nothing too serious. I had a bandage over my eye, but it wasn’t anything permanent. Far better than many veterans can say.”
Twilight continued on to explain that while he was injured, he was at a base camp, prepping food for the soldiers, when a familiar voice called out to him, addressing him by a nickname that he hadn’t heard in a decade’s time.
“Advisor?” Yor mimicked.
“Because I didn’t have the toy soldier set, I wasn’t allowed to have a rank when we played war. As such, I was an ‘advisor’. And the only people who ever called me that were my friends from Luwen. The very same I thought died in the warehouse that I picked for us to play in. The same friends I thought I had killed. And all of a sudden, I was just that same little boy who cried over everything. I burst into tears, the guilt of years upon years being removed in an instant—only for it all to be thrown back at me at the very next moment.”
“What do you mean?” Yor leaned in.
Loid reclaimed his hand from her and reached into his pocket, tossing three pieces of metal onto the table—three dog tags.
“Are these—”
“No—Not really, anyways. They’re replicas that Franky made for me. It’s why he was here earlier today. The real ones were… destroyed.”
It wasn’t a lie. The tags were burned along with everything else that used to belong to the soldier now known as Twilight. That lie still came with the cost of ash in Twilight's mouth.
Yor picked one up and surveyed its surface with her soft finger before holding it tightly to her chest and asking Loid, “What happened to them?”
Twilight ran a hand over his face and then through his hair, taking in a deep breath before continuing on. “They were part of an ill-conceived and reckless plan known as the Roberts campaign. And their tags were all that was left of them…”
Yor had seen so much bloodshed over her life—ended too many lives to count. Death was her business, and blood her trade. She knew intimately how fragile a human life was and just how easily it could be stolen away. She had bore witness to countless tragedies during her time in Garden. Fellow assassins with respected reputations being killed in an instant due to letting their guard down for a mere moment—civilians being dragged into the fray by the inscrutable villains that she hunted—unspeakable horrors and tragedies.
But hearing Loid recount the fate of his friends formed a river over her cheeks.
She took a closer look at the dog tag and recognized the name from Loid’s drawing. But something was off. “Private Michael McNiece? Not Major?” she looked up.
“I’m sorry?” Loid replied, his face showing no sign of knowing what she was talking about.
“Your friends—I thought they were higher ranks. A Major, a Corporal, and a General.”
“No,” Loid clarified. “That was our ‘ranks’ when we were playing as… kids…”
A puzzled expression took over her husband's face. “I told you my nickname. I never told you my friends’.”
Yor straightened up like an arrow, a dumb and rigid smile spreading across her lips. “Oh, right! I guess, with all that happened earlier, I never got the chance to tell you…”
“Tell me what?” Loid questioned, a suspicious brow raised high.
Yor placed the dog tag back on the table and rested her hands in her lap, her vision downturned in shame. “I had been feeling rather inadequate as a wife. I feel so bad with our arrangement since it feels like I’m always the one benefiting. I know I’m not good for a whole lot, but I want to do more. I want to be a better wife to you and a better mother to Anya. So, I went into your room to see if there was anything to tidy up. There wasn’t, but I did notice something on your chair. It was a drawing of you and your friends…”
Twilight’s eyes widened larger than he ever thought possible. ‘She entered my room? We established that as a rule before we even moved in… Could she have been looking for some….No! It’s Yor… She’s only ever tried to do good. Chances are she only ever has done good…’
He looked down to his blood soaked hands, contrasting them with her innocent face. She looked absolutely guilt-ridden, but how could he ever consider her as such? After all she did to take care of their family? After he entered her life under false pretenses and manipulated her into the danger of his mission?
Finally, he reached out to her, keeping his palm up as an invitation. “How many times do I have to reassure you that you’re a fantastic wife and mother, Yor? Our family—the Forgers are incomplete without you.”
She looked up at him, surprised by how quickly he ignored her indiscretion. Reaching out for his hands, she held back a few tears. “Thank you, Loid.”
Her expression turned sour again as she remembered what they had originally been speaking about. “I’m sorry, I got us sidetracked from your story. Please, continue.”
She waited for a moment, expecting Loid to continue on, but he showed no sign of doing so. As a matter of fact, all he seemed to do was clench his free hand and scowl off to the side.
“Loid?”
“I’m sorry…” he muttered. “I don’t want to go any further than that.”
She brought a hand to her mouth and gasped. “No, it’s fine! I should have been more sensitive. Why don’t you go and get some sleep. I’ll clean up here.”
“You don’t understand,” he stated, clenching his fist tighter, this time raising his head enough for her to notice how wet his eyes had become. He took in a deep breath through his nose and relaxed both his body and fist. “If I tell you any more, there won’t be any going back. You’ll hate me more than you can possibly imagine.”
“Loid, I could never hate you!” she desperately assured him, rounding the table’s corner and kneeling at his chair, his hand still in hers.
His warm, calloused hand caressed her cheek and he smiled bitterly at her, with his eyes softer than she had ever seen. “You don’t know enough about me to ever claim that. You don’t know the lies I’ve told you, or the ones I still tell you.”
Yor grabbed onto the hand holding her cheek and looked sincerely into his eyes. ‘I don’t know what lies he’s talking about, but I can see the guilt in his eyes. He really believes he’s a monster of some sort, doesn’t he? He really thinks that whatever secrets he’s hiding are worse than mine… If he’s shown me this much trust, then it’s only fair that I do the same!’
“You’re not the only one with a dark past, Loid. And you’re definitely not the only person in this family that’s hiding something. I don’t know what it is that you feel so strongly about, but I guarantee what I’ve hidden from you is far worse than anything you’ve kept from me.”
“Yor…”
The Thorn Princess stood up and shyly backed away by a single step, freely advertising anxiety and fear across her face. “I have a few skeletons hiding in my closet too, and I’ve been thinking about telling you about them. I don’t know what it is that you’re so confident I’ll hate you over, but it pales in comparison to what I have to tell you. I imagine you’ll kick me out the moment it comes out of my mouth—if you even believe me, that is.”
“Yor, stop!” Loid abruptly stood.
“I can’t!” she defiantly cried. “I know that this marriage isn’t…that we aren’t…”
Her words drifted off with a certain echo. It wasn’t the sound made when someone was searching for the proper word to slide in. It was laced with hesitance. The same sort of hesitance that would halt someone from purposely pricking their finger with a needle. A hesitance born from a desire to avoid pain.
Twilight had become quite familiar with that feeling of evasion in his own musings. It seemed that with each passing day of Operation Strix that he had to come face to face with that same challenge. Truth be told, he didn’t want to hear her fill in those blanks either.
“Loid, I can’t keep hiding this sort of thing after you’ve just opened yourself up about something so personal. It isn’t fair to either of us!”
Twilight couldn’t help but have the defeat show across his face. Had he truly reached such lows? Had he truly allowed himself to become so comfortable with acting native?
He stepped forward and took Yor’s hands in his own, with nothing but breath’s distance between them. “Yor, I don’t have the faintest idea what you might be hiding, but… I could never hate you. You mean too much to Anya—to me.”
“Loid…” she whispered, blush spreading across her face.
“It’s unfair, but I am begging you to keep hiding whatever you’re keeping from me. If you don’t… I don’t know how I could possibly keep anything from you… It’s all I can do right now to not say everything I’ve been keeping from you.”
“So why don’t we tell each other everything? Isn’t that what a husband and wife are supposed to do? Not keep any secrets?”
Tears welled up in her eyes and Loid pulled her in close, wrapping his arms around her before desperately telling her, “I’ve lost so much in this life, and for the longest while I accepted that. I kept going in spite of that fact. I stopped caring about what I wanted and focused my entire being on helping the world no matter the cost to myself. But now I have you! I have Anya! I have a life and a family worth protecting! I don’t want to lose that! I don’t want to lose you!”
Yor returned the embrace, practically cutting off Loid's breath as she squeezed him back. “I don’t want to lose you either, Loid! Or Anya!”
The two stood there for a span of time that neither could tell. Seconds—minutes—hours—days. It felt like an eternity to them, and it was not nearly long enough.
Yor was the first to break the silence.
“Loid?” she gently called to him.
He didn’t respond so much as he hummed in the affirmative, his head hovering hers and taking in her calming scent.
“This secret you don’t want to tell me—can it come between our family? Can it hurt us?”
There was an eerie silence before Loid simply responded, “Yes.”
She pulled him in close, and he asked the same of her. And she responded, “Yes.”
“If your secret tries to interfere with us—with the forgers, what will you do, Loid?”
She could feel his arms tighten around her even further as she awaited his response.
“I’ll protect my family.”
And just as before, he asked the same of her.
And just as before, she answered as he did.
The silence of their apartment returned, and they continued holding onto each other as if both their lives depended on the other. And perhaps they did.
Again, they didn’t know how much time had passed, but as dawn began to crack just above the horizon and as the sky began to light up, dimly as it was, the pair decided that it was time to take their leave of one another. They retreated down the hall, hand in hand, halting at their respective rooms.
Loid wanted to invite her to stay—to extend this night for fear of it never returning, but Yor had something else in mind. Something that wasn’t entirely unwelcome.
“Loid?”
“Yes, Yor?”
“Could I ask a favor? Just for tonight?”
He nodded his head in response. “
“That drawing in your room had a name under yours, It wasn’t Loid Forger. I don’t know why it’s not, and I don’t care, but do you think I could call you by it? Just this once?”
Loid was stunned by her request. Even when she brought up the drawing, he hadn’t realized that he had written down a dead man’s name on the page. And yet, she hadn’t done anything with that information aside from try to help him. She never once suspected him for what he was.
It seemed only fair to grant her request.
He nodded and she lit up the room with her beaming smile.
“Goodnight then,” she said, reaching up and planting a chaste kiss on his cheek, just beside the corner of his lip.
Twilight had thought he had lost all attachment to that name. It belonged to a boy who might as well have died in Luwen—a scoundrel who swindled money from his father—a coward who couldn’t protect his mother—a fool who blindly hated his fellow man simply because of where they had been born. It belonged to a man bereft of both belonging and purpose—who substituted the bonds of friendship and the drives of passion with warfare and bloodshed. He’d thought it impossible for anyone to say that name again and have it sound so sweet.
He was proven wrong the moment Yor pulled away from him.
“—[REDACTED]”