Chapter Text
The March wind tickles Yor's hair and she drops her eyes from the brilliant sky. It's shining a hard blue like Loid's eyes today, a hard cheery brightness. His eyes are now hidden behind his shut eyelids, crinkling with his put-on smile.
Doesn't he want their arrangement to be real too? His answer wasn't what she wanted to hear.
—I think, what I want to know...is how he feels about it.
Yor clasps her hands and makes a bittersweet smile to herself.
—Maybe it's selfish of me, to hope for that...but it's how I feel, all the same.
The cry of a distant bird catches her ear. Yor lifts her head. A hawk soaring above Berlint, above houses and rooftops, simply soaring in ease. Then another hawk cry rings.
Yor strains to see. Where's the other hawk? She gently presses her coat sleeve a moment, where her arm wound is, just above her right elbow, eyes shut, ears, listening.
The flying hawk cries again. The unseen hawk answers.
Yor's arm wound doesn't hurt like it did...and maybe not just thanks to the salve.
Hands on the overlook park railing, the wind caressing her hair, her eyes on that steady bird, soaring to the sun, Yor hears the second hawk out there who knows the first. She dares to smile a little more. A quiet resolve enters her smile.
—Come to it Loid, when you will...but let it be soon, for both our sakes.
Yor lets out a soft sigh. The hawk keeps flying. The wind answers, gently touching Yor's dark hair.
. . .
The pigeons in the overlook park coo as they peck for crumbs among among the pedestrians' feet. A bird flying in the sky cries out and the softest sigh escapes Yor as she looks to the sky. Twilight breaks his eyes from the sky, to look at Yor.
She dropped her eyes at his answer just before, and smiled a bittersweet smile, lost in her own world. Now she watches the soaring hawk, her eyes fixed on the sky. There's two hawk cries.
Twilight holds the railing and makes a dry swallow. He searches her face.
Yor knows. He isn't fooling anyone. That in between the pauses and spaces of their voices, the unspoken thoughts trailing, speaking into their silences, he understood what she was asking.
She knew he'd understood.
Our arrangement...how much longer will it continue? Do you want it to be…real?
He'd evaded her.
And what about you, Loid?
Dr. Forger answered in the cheery, helpful voice he too at times hated.
Yes, I'd appreciate it very much as well.
The hawks cry again, two cries.
Yor presses her arm above her right elbow, her gaze intent on the hawk in the sky. She drops her hand, and something new is in her smile. As the wind swirls her hair, Yor stands in quiet dignity, hands on the railing, with the serene stillness she sometimes has, a stillness Twilight rarely knows.
Twilight furrows his brow at the phantom pang he felt in his right arm as the hawk cried and Yor dropped her hand…where his bullet hole scar from Yor’s brother is.
Pain? This makes no sense. This healed wound he's kept covered since November with shirtsleeves and sometimes skin patches? Long healed, and thankfully a clean graze. It almost throbs.
Twilight wants to press his right bicep, yet he is stays his hand. He grips the railing, his knuckles, white. The only reason Yuri is alive is because of her. Is it some other reason that stayed Twilight's hand during the long, grueling Wheeler mission?
(He grasps his hat the tighter so the teasing wind won't gust it into the city below.
The same reason why he fell weak in the knees upon his return that night? Why he collapsed at the threshold to Yor's bright smile and her greeting of “Welcome home, Loid”? The same reason he smiled when Yor said she'd be happy to do his share of work?
She is the reason? Yor? Or something else? It's not STRIX. He hasn't thought of STRIX at all since Yor's watched that hawk.
“Yor—” Twilight stops, his lips parted. What can he say?
Twilight doesn't know. Loid is afraid to say more. The man he is under those personas, he has something to say, but he's terrified to utter it, or even to bring it to mind.
He rips his eyes from Yor's bittersweet smile to the sky. This sky, always there for him no matter where he is—today is hard blue, coldly bright and so vast. Where is his home?
Then within him, or perhaps without, a still, small voice speaks.
For this to last, ever and always...isn't that what you want?
The spy tries to drown out the voice, yet there's a sudden rush of wind, rustling his blonde hair, filling his ears. The birds fly up. But the man with the buried name, under the personas, he listens closer.
His ears are full of the flapping of doves' wings. And in the stillness after, two soft coos.