Chapter Text
"AlrightyesI'llgowithyou. Thanksgottacatchmybusbye", Anya said before running out of the library and leaving the rest of the study group speechless.
She reached the bus stop with twenty minutes to spare, wheezing from the run. She had left half of her books there. Hopefully Becky would grab them for her. She had just been so flustered.
Get it together, Forger!, she thought while she sat at the empty bus stop to catch her breath. It's just a date. You're sixteen! Maybe sixteen. Regardless this isn’t a big deal!
Why had she run away? Between fight or flight, Anya Forger was squarely fight. Or, she tried to be, at least. Her options were Loid Forger's tact or Yor's left hook.
This was different though. She never thought that she would even get asked out, let alone want to go on a date. What had changed?
Sitting on the bus stop bench, she took out the little compact Becky had given her last year, with the sheep on the front. She stared at her face. Poked her cheeks. Blew a raspberry. Had her baby fat melted away? Did she look older? She searched for some outward transformation that would tell her why she had done something as stupid as accept a date. Why she had run. Why she had betrayed all her convictions from way back in seventh grade.
Because that's what it felt like. A betrayal.
—
Seventh grade brought two big changes to Anya Forger’s life. The smaller change: her study group with Becky and the boys. The larger change: hormones.
Puberty had not been kind to Anya Forger. She had lied about her age when she was adopted, meaning that she was perpetually a year or two behind her cohort. She actually didn’t know how much she was behind. She had told her papa she was six, and she had been telling the other kids at the orphanage she was five, but even that had been a guess. She had always been smaller than everyone. It was only in the couple of years before that she had really caught up academically, math aside. Feeling a little bit out of step with her classmates wasn’t anything new. Plus, Becky had always treated her like anyone else, even like somebody special.
The previous few years had been different, though. Anya didn’t really mind when her friends started getting zits and her own face was miraculously unblemished, or when Becky got her period first, or when their chubby cheeks gave way to a tangle of limbs. That stuff all sounded awful and she wasn’t looking forward to it. At the same time, it felt like a much bigger difference than just being smaller than everyone. She worried that just as she started experiencing all of that herself, everyone else would have it all figured out. She didn’t want to feel like some kind of gangly baby giraffe while her friends were starting to resemble actual adults.
If that were all of it, though, Anya thought she would have been fine. Plenty of kids are late bloomers. No, the worst of it wasn’t her own hormones, it was everyone else’s. She was trapped inside her own head with everyone’s thoughts.
Since she had been able to hear peoples’ thoughts, she had been hearing about sex, so Anya was no stranger to it. As a kid, it was just background noise, one uninteresting kind of fish in the ocean of thoughts she was thrown into every time she entered a crowd. Generally, it was fleeting. People were going about their days in public and had other things on their mind.
She went to Becky about it when they were ten (or had she been nine? She hoped she hadn’t been eight). Her mama and papa had been having some really unusual thoughts, and Anya didn’t know what to make of them, exactly. She had asked Becky about it.
“Anya, do you mean SEX?”, Becky hissed while she looked wildly around to see if anyone had overheard.
Suddenly Anya had become the shocked one. “That’s what sex is?”
But Becky had explained there was more to it. It was something you only did with somebody you really loved. Those thoughts had only gotten worse, though, when her mama and papa finally, truly, actually got together. It almost made Anya regret all the work she and Bond had put into keeping them from killing each other long enough to be married for real. Ultimately Loid and Yor seemed to be happy though, and it was part of loving each other. They were pretty good about waiting until Anya was out of the house or dead asleep to actually act on those thoughts, and just because they did all that stuff didn’t mean she would ever have to.
Nothing could have prepared Anya for teenagers. After the summer when her classmates started turning thirteen, something changed. Suddenly she didn’t just have to hear Loid and Yor Forger, loving adults with both a deep sense of respect and a solid understanding of human anatomy. Now Anya was overhearing thoughts about her classmates, her teachers, sometimes even Becky and herself. Thankfully most of it wasn't outright sex, but she could only handle so much of the barrage of thoughts about kissing, and touching, and imagining people naked. She hadn’t realized that people had those thoughts before they even started dating somebody. Her parents had been married for years before that really set in. Some thoughts were clearly intrusive to their owners’ heads, and some were lingering daydreams. Some were sort of vague about the logistics of what went where, and some would have been hilariously incorrect if they weren’t so horrifyingly inside Anya’s head all the time. And why would anyone fantasize about Mr. Henderson? Not. Elegant.
It had started with just a few kids in her class as background noise the year before, but in seventh grade it got much, much worse. That was half of the reason Anya agreed to study with Damian in the first place. Sure, she needed more academic help than she had in years because she was so overwhelmed, and Damian seemed earnest for once. But also, when she listened to his thoughts, he was still so affected by his misguided confession that he hit some kind of emotional gridlock around her. He immediately stifled any thoughts that bubbled up about Anya, good or bad, and only let himself have neutral opinions. It was actually sweet. Anya was a little bit worried that she had broken him, but at least his thoughts were more or less safe.
Disaster struck halfway through the school year, though. Hormones hit Becky, hard, before anyone else in their group. Anya had already started receding into herself, but her safe haven was gone as soon as she had to listen to her best friend think about Ewen and Emile and Damian . Becky had always been a romantic, but her daydreams had never been so vivid or so… fleshy.
Anya spent nearly a week trying to avoid everyone. All four of them had separately asked if she was okay, which would have been touching if she weren’t so preoccupied. She was pretty sure Ewen and Emile had never talked to her on their own before.
It all came to a head while Anya was studying at the kitchen table that Friday night with Bond lying by her feet. After a full week of avoiding her friends, Becky’s inadvertent betrayal, and the general stress of bombardment by hormones that weren’t even her own, Anya was on edge. She wasn’t even supposed to be home on Fridays. Normally she stayed at Becky’s, but that was out of the question now. On top of all of that, Bond had a feeling that Anya and her parents were going to have a fight. She had read the same sentence in her history book four times now, and each time she finished, she realized that she couldn’t remember a single word. Loid was sitting at the coffee table reading the news, and Yor lounged on the couch, gently draping her foot over her husband’s shoulder.
She began again, reading quietly to herself. “In 1432, the towns of Berlint and Cöllm merged into Berlint-Cöllm, resulting in-”
On the couch, Yor shifted, causing Loid to look over at her with a sly, knowing smile. Yor responded with her own hooded look and small smile, and they both thought distinctly about what they would normally be doing on a Friday night while Anya spent the night at Becky’s. Their thoughts were a flash of hands and skin and more than hands and-
“Would you please stop THINKING SO LOUDLY!” Anya yelled, throwing her pencil down on the table.
Both Loid and Yor were momentarily stunned and blushing slightly but Loid recovered first to say, “Anya, we weren’t doing anything.”
“That’s not the problem!,” she wailed. “You keep thinking things! It was fine when it was just you and I didn’t love it but I could mostly ignore it even though I had no idea that would happen when Bond and I got you together but now it’s not just you and I have to deal with it all the time at school and I can’t even be near Becky right now and I just want one place I could relax so could you please stop thinking?”
All of her parents’ amorous thoughts had very rapidly turned to confusion, and Yor asked, “Honey, what are you talking about?”
This released something in Anya that she had never intended to say out loud.
“I can hear your thoughts, Mama. I’ve always heard your thoughts! I know you’re an assassin and I know Papa’s a spy and I know Bond can see the future sometimes, by the way. I lied about my age at the orphanage so Papa would adopt me because he was just like Bondman so I’m probably not even thirteen and I knew Mama was an assassin when we met her which is the whole reason I got you together in the first place and then when Mama was hired to kill you , Papa, I swapped out her poisons with grape juice for months so you wouldn’t kill each other before you realized love each other and that worked but you started having SEX which was fine, because love, but also so gross, because sex, and now sex is all anyone at school can think about and I can’t even talk to Becky and I never want to date anyone and I just wish everyone would stop thinking so loud.”
With one deep breath, Anya transitioned directly into huge, gasping sobs while her parents processed this run-on sentence. A still-blushing Yor sat down at the table next to Anya and pulled her clearly traumatized child into a powerful but confused hug. She petted the girl’s hair and made comforting noises. Anya was too upset to even take in what either parent was thinking.
Bafflingly, the first thing Yor said was, “Well, that’s certainly an outburst worthy of any thirteen year old I’ve ever met.”
Between gentle sobs into her mother’s shoulder, Anya asked, “That’s what you took away?”
“The most important bit right now is that you’re upset,” Yor said. She thought about all the times Yuri had blown up about something at the same age and needed comforting. “You know, Yuri used to- oh, actually, I guess you heard that just now.”
“I like to hear you say it, though. Out loud,” Anya told her mother as she looked up through red-rimmed eyes.
Yor smiled and kissed Anya’s forehead. Loid had gotten up to make cocoa for everyone while he parsed through the situation and Yor handled the immediate comforting, but now the cocoa was ready. He set down the drinks and took a chair on Anya’s other side, pulling his daughter into a second strong hug.
“You know we love you, right?” he asked first.
“I think I knew before you did, Papa,” Anya said, with a small, sniffly smile. “I heard it.”
“Good.” Loid said, putting the cocoa mug in her hands and kissing his daughter’s forehead, too. “Now, please, start from the beginning.”
Yor shot him a look that said, Is now really the time?
Loid’s face in reply said clearly, Yes.
So Anya told them. She started with her birth parents and the scientists who experimented on her brain and kept talking all the way through the horrors of telepathic puberty. The initial shock that their daughter had been able to hear their thoughts, and all that implied for an assassin and a spy, took some adjustment. It also made some things fall into place, though, like how they had found each other to begin with. In the past, both had suspected that was the other parent’s scheme before accepting it as pure coincidence.
The whole family took the week off; Loid and Yor set to work teaching Anya every focus trick in the book (both books) to help her block out the chaos in her head. With WISE’s best spy and the Garden’s best assassin to help solve the problem, and Bond along for emotional support, Anya had the beginnings of a technique figured out within days. It was like flexing a muscle she didn’t know she had, and she only improved with practice. Sure, every now and then something, usually innocuous, broke through. That happened for particularly loud thoughts, or thoughts about Anya herself, or just if she was tired. For the most part, though, she was alone in her head for the first time she could remember.
It was bliss.
Anya found that as soon as she had an off switch for her peers’ cacophony of lust, she didn’t mind it. After Yor had become too flustered, Loid had haltingly explained that those thoughts are mostly normal, just supposed to be private. What mattered was what people said and did, and intended to say and do, with some exceptions. She found that she could let her mental walls down, listen in on her peers like she was watching some kind of nature documentary, and close it off before it became too much.
It helped that she was able to focus without background noise for the first time in her life. Within the month her grades shot up. She didn’t even need the study group anymore; she just went because she wanted to see her friends.
The adjustment at home was awkward as Loid and Yor got used to the norm they never knew existed. The Forgers adjusted, though. In some ways, Anya felt better than ever with her family. She had known for a while, deep down, that they would accept her when she told them about the mind reading. They had accepted trying to kill each other, after all. It had still taken that moment of pure desperation to tell them everything. After a lifetime of secrets, she hadn’t realized how much lighter she would feel having somebody, two somebodies, with whom she could be fully transparent.
Even so, the whole experience had one lingering negative: she had seen too much. If her peers' thoughts were a nature documentary, she wanted no part in that ecosystem. Anya Forger would never, ever date. Both parents firmly supported her conviction.
—
Now, at sixteen (fifteen?), Anya sat at her lonely bus stop and thought about how she had directly betrayed that plan. She was going on a date, after four years of loudly declaring she would absolutely never do any such thing.
Something was different though. Anya had been around the corner from Becky when she had her first kiss last month and it seemed… nice. Nice, in a whole body feels warm, brain goes blank, happy kind of way. She knew she shouldn’t have listened in, but curiosity got the best of her and now Anya was doubting everything she had thought for the last four years. Yes, the mass of teenagers’ romantic thoughts was overwhelming and awful when Anya had been, realistically, twelve and couldn’t shut them out. But what about just one person at sixteen? One person who didn’t fantasize about Henderson (still!), who wasn’t a creep about it. One person who made her feel warm, and happy. Maybe she could feel those feelings too.
So when was asked on her first date, she didn’t say no, like she had been planning for four years. She had panicked, and said yes, and run away.
She took a deep breath and stepped onto the bus. It would be fine. After all, it was just Emile. How bad could it be?