Chapter Text
Twilight prides himself in his self-control, in his ability to compartmentalize. To say he sublimates wouldn’t be much of a stretch, though he likes to think he’s not truly haunted by anything these days.
It becomes less of a fact whenever he wakes up in a cold sweat, the image of his mother — unseeing and cold to the touch, buried under a pile of rubble after the bombings — burned on the inside of his eyelids. Able to awaken the dead, he might be, but she’d been too broken, her wounds too severe, and although someone had already taken her place at Death’s door, she’d succumbed not long after.
Twilight does forget her face throughout the years, but never her voice, her voice, begging him to put an end to it, knowing that it was him who brought her back in the first place. Her tone was soft with an underlying terror and pain, but free of judgment, as if speaking to a child he undeniably was, urging him ever-so-gently to fix a mistake he’d made. At the time, Twilight hadn’t let go of her hand for the longest time, unprepared to never be able to touch or be touched by her ever again, of not being close enough to smell sandalwood and the sun in her embrace, count the faint freckles peppered over the bridge of her nose.
In his youth, she’d seen him reanimate garden-variety bugs and neighbors’ pets, her eyes gone cold and lips thinned into a harsh line, a chiding edge to her voice; “There’s a point, you know, for there being an end at all,” she’d say, not unkindly.
His mother never quite appreciated his gift.
And after her death, Twilight didn’t really appreciate it, either.
He quit calling it a gift too, not long after.
Realistically, it was more akin to a curse.
His enlistment in the army had been a short affair, with WISE scouting him a few years into his service. But if you ask Twilight and with him at liberty to answer, it hadn’t been short enough. More than once he’d had to scramble for a second touch of an enemy that he’d reanimated by mistake during a tussle, Death’s hand far too quick for Twilight to react properly. Mutual shock had nearly cost him his life more often than he’d like to admit, though it came to happen less and less throughout the years; now he wears gloves constantly and keeps two extra pairs on him at all times.
No one knows about the curse except for Franky and his Handler, for safety reasons — lest she send Twilight on a mission that has his skin exposed near any possible deaths, which happen way more often than what’s ordinarily planned. Twilight does reanimate people for information here and there, but he keeps his wristwatch close, always wary of the ticking of time.
One minute; he always remembers, and has learned to count it with precision and astounding trepidation. He may rob Death of that single moment, but Twilight has never had any interest in playing god. And no matter how much he does it, it never quite stops being just the slightest bit nauseating to see people wake from their final slumber, mid-scream and confused and suffused with the embrace and scent of death. He usually spends a good deal of time scrubbing his skin raw in the shower after, not quite afraid there’s anything to catch, really, but still plagued by an endless loop of strangers’ faces contorted at seeing the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak, their jaw hanging open in a permanent gasp of horror and awe alike.
But it’s lights out again under the minute, and he’s mastered the art of shoving his feelings into the backburner. All missions take precedence; that’s a given. Twilight can worry about being damaged goods once he’s dead.
He hardly thinks he’ll be able to resuscitate himself, so that’s a bonus.
Down the line comes Operation Strix, and then Anya, who blurs the lines of professionalism slightly. Twilight has never had a soft spot for children, but her earnestness is quick to win him over.
He can’t bring himself to regret it.
Garden is a threat, is the thing.
They don’t necessarily operate under Ostania’s mantle, and though middling, their actions require countermeasures — some of their assassins manage to be unerringly dangerous, and they’ve been after WISE’s own marks often enough to make a handful of missions go down like a house of cards, which is no small claim.
Twilight is at last tasked to pursue one of their cogs, to which he dedicates every ounce of every accrued skillset in preparation; not doing so would be reckless, considering the infamy of their name. Their trail is still very much hot on the outskirts of an abandoned building near the suburbs. Inside, the air is stale and just the wrong edge of biting, with most rooms completely bare save for a thick layer of dust over every available surface. The moon’s at its highest point outside, but natural light finds difficulty to trickle through the barred windows, making for a vaguely unsettling atmosphere.
Great.
It’s easy to file rooms as unimportant as he goes; Twilight doesn’t want to miss any details, but at the same time there’s little to be seen in them and no time to waste. He still curses his surprise at finding the body of a civilian in one of the many empty rooms, broken pallets scattered about and blood marring some of the walls and the floor surrounding her corpse.
An altercation of some sort, perhaps, with the woman most likely used as a hostage or a human shield. She doesn’t seem to be hurt that badly, except for the large bloodstain about her belly. When one considers Garden’s M.O. and any lack of defensive wounds, she was probably stabbed once and bled out.
She could have valuable information, Twilight reckons, about the killer. Finding out why she was there and what they wanted with her would also be much easier to garner directly from the source; some things aren’t always as simple as they seem.
Bracing himself, Twilight extracts one of his gloves as he crouches beside her, peeling his shirtsleeves so his wristwatch is visible. He counts down to the next minute, breathes in, and reaches out.
She tenses under his hold, and something, something keeps Twilight from immediately letting go, as he would.
Her eyes are the color of freshly drawn blood.
And perhaps that should’ve been warning enough. But in that moment, under the limelight of the moon and surrounded by her first soft intake of breath, an expression peaceful unlike any other he’s encountered so far in situations such as these, Twilight’s mind is flooded by one thing, and one thing only:
Oh.
The skin of her wrist is soft. Her pulse, when it comes, jackrabbits under her flesh. Her eyes are alert and quick with intelligence. Her long hair cascades down her back like a dark river when she sits up, ever so slowly. It’s strange, Twilight surmises, to now think of goddesses from old mythos, faes and sirens and nymphs from children’s tales, but there’s a certain air about her — of calm and goodness that veils power, or strength, or death.
Were he a religious man, perhaps he would’ve wept, so strong is the feeling. As it is, Twilight is left gaping, breath lodged painfully in his lugs, his words lost somewhere in the wind.
She’s mesmerizing.
“Sir?” She rasps.
Twilight lets go of her wrist as if burned and jumps to his feet, putting a good distance between them; he won’t risk a second, accidental touch undermining his questioning. Looking at his watch, fifteen seconds have already passed. He curses under his breath.
“Ma’am,” he nods, grateful for the excuse to peruse around the room with his eyes for the second time. His ungloved hand trembles, but he expertly wills it to stop. Focus. “You were gravely injured. Do you remember who the assailant was?”
She’s silent for a lingering moment. When he dares to look, her eyes have glazed over.
“A woman, a — a friend. Or, I thought she was, anyway.”
When her gaze finds his, Twilight feels pinned; a butterfly to a board. She seems almost self-aware, the tilt of her head attesting to her level of perception, which isn’t a good thing. Trial and error have shown that most awakened don’t realize they’ve lost their lives in the first place, and the few that do are the hardest to extract information from, too absorbed in their mortality to be anywhere near coherent. Twilight takes a step closer; this might’ve been a fruitless venture, after all.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, with an expression taken by a facet of grief, “it must be horrible to bring people back like this.”
He stops in his tracks, blood draining from his veins.
“Venom Violet is her alias,” the woman continues, voice gone strangely tight. Her throat jumps as she swallows. “Miranda Stern is her actual name.”
It’s already more than he’d hoped to get. Twilight takes a deep breath. “How did you —”
Something slices through his arm and he grunts, a lone blade scattering to the ground a few feet beyond. Twilight swivels on his heels and is met with another woman, standing tall by the entrance he’d gone through before, clad in black with her mouth covered by a thin cloth, a smile with too many teeth still visible from a distance. She expertly twirls a dagger between her fingers, eyes sharp. Something in his body coils; Twilight has met plenty of predators in the field, but while Garden is more than enough to put him on edge, there’s a civilian with him.
He quickly reaches for his gun.
“Thought I’d put you on the ground for good, love,” she leers, but not at him. Twilight can hear the awakened woman shuffling sluggishly to her feet, so he takes a few steps to the side and then forward to shield her, but still keeping his distance. “Like a little garden pest, you are. But don’t worry; I won’t make that mistake again.”
Twilight aims for Venom Violet’s heart as she widens her stance. She raises her armed hand, takes a step forward, and staggers. At her choking gasp, Twilight grits his teeth and sighs harshly through his nose.
Goddamnit.
The assassin falls to the ground like a sack of bricks, her body convulsing violently until it doesn’t.
Well.
He could bring her back and try to ask his questions, but being one of the last people she saw, it’s highly unlikely she’ll cooperate. Twilight bites the inside of his cheek, frustrated, but there’s not much to be done about it.
There’s a thin flicker of guilt in his chest. But that, too, cannot be made better.
He turns his attention to the other woman in the room, who doesn’t look frazzled in the slightest despite being viciously pursued by a high-grade assassin, and then having watched said assassin drop dead out of nowhere. Her shoulders are set, feet held apart, and there’s a flicker of gravitas in her expression that Twilight only catches the tail end of; certainly not for long enough to quantify it, though he does quirk an inquisitive brow at her.
“Looks like you’re sticking around,” Twilight says, with a levity he decidedly does not feel.
The woman looks at him and then down at Venom Violet’s body, and frowns. Twilight isn’t actually expecting her to draw the correct conclusions from just that. All things considered — rumored espionage and scandals about human experimentation, bands of assassins for hire and nearly half the country’s population suffering from shell-shock — this sort of thing is pretty outrageous.
Shockingly, only a second later, her expression clears.
“Oh.”
Twilight narrows his eyes, sucking at the back of his teeth. Her body sags a little in understandable relief.
Maybe not.
He’s never left humans alive for long enough to stay, is the thing, with the notable exception of his mother. Her case had been extreme, of course, and the woman beside him is nowhere near as injured to fall mortally ill a few hours down the line. The animals Twilight had brought back continued living on though, so he’s certain it’ll hold, but it’s strange to have someone be given a second shot at life at his hand.
The sudden weight of responsibility is a little startling. He’s still grateful the woman doesn’t thank him immediately, because the means are unworthy of her gratitude: assassin or not, another life had to be sacrificed for it.
She reaches for the wound in her belly, but her palm comes away relatively clear — wound mended, blood nearly dried over. When she turns to him, she outstretches her clean hand out for a handshake.
“Yor Briar,” she says.
He recalls the scent of the sun, freckles over pale skin.
Her scent of burnt flesh, blood peppered over her face.
This many years later, the memory shouldn’t make him want to vomit, but it is, surging up at the back of his throat. Twilight looks at Yor’s hand, and his resulting sigh is more than a little unsteady.
He pulls his sleeves down, puts the glove back on, and then reaches for her. Strangely, he can only think of the softness of her skin, and how he’ll never feel it again. It leaves him bereft, though it certainly shouldn’t.
He’ll need to be careful around her, for more reasons than the obvious one.
“Loid Forger.”
Yor gives his gloved hand a pointed look, and in that moment, he knows she understands how it all works.
It’s eerie, is what it is.
Examining the body procures a note: it’s encrypted, so he’ll save it for later.
Loid Forger, on the other hand, walks Yor home.
It’s a modest apartment in downtown Berlint, and she lives on her own. Yor has a brother who works as a civil servant, she says, who she’ll check in with to make sure no one’s noticed her absence. Twilight tactfully doesn’t mention she’d still been warm to the touch, and that it’s unlikely anyone would’ve reported her as missing at this stage.
He means to bid her goodbye and never look back. He does. But then he remembers her file as he’d been perusing the City Hall’s documents with Franky for a wife that would suit Operation Strix, and though she hadn’t garnered all that much interest from either of them initially, something gnaws at his brain. Single, never married, no children, respectable job, Twilight recalls; long raven hair that snaked and curled like a bewitched riverbend, the blood of her eyes and the softness of her skin, her voice, poised and gentle and warm —
“How did you know?” He blurts out.
The staircase that leads up to her building is of burnt cement; it grows nearly opalescent under the street lights. Yor’s dress is still stained underneath his borrowed coat, but the ensemble still paints a beautiful picture. Her face flushes a pretty shade of pink at his open scrutiny.
“I knew, of course, that I had…died,” she offers demurely, managing a small, self-deprecating smile. “It wasn’t pleasant, as one would expect. And you —” Her breath catches, and there’s a strange, unequivocal shift in her: eyes suddenly unfathomable, Yor glows under the warm limelight, and Twilight wishes he could understand the urge to fall at her feet. “You looked terribly sad, is all.”
He swallows harshly against the unexpected lump in his throat. It’s humiliating to have allowed himself to be this transparent, especially with a stranger. Amateurish, he thinks, though he can still work this to his advantage. “So you extrapolated.”
“With no denial from you, so far.” She smiles, and it’s nearly like the sun’s gone up. Yor shrugs. “Stranger things have happened.”
Twilight laughs airly despite himself. “Really?”
Yor grins, blushing yet again — he sort of hopes it to be a common occurrence, and promptly chastises himself for the thought. “I promise I can keep a secret.”
“I believe you.” Strangely, it’s the truth. Sort of.
Yor takes another step backward up the staircase, and Twilight knows her mouth is already forming up her goodnights. This turn of events is unexpected, but he’s no stranger to course correcting. Yor seems good enough at it herself, with nerves strong enough to face any possible civilian-oriented difficulties of Operation Strix head-on. That he’s awakened her could be a complication, but adjustments can be made, and he’s not really above using their little incident as a veiled scorecard to ask Yor to help him with this. She can still say no, and he’ll go on his merry way.
Besides, Anya would like her, too.
“I’m sorry,” he says, fighting down the unseemly flood of shame. “I’d like to — may I ask you something?”
She blinks up at him, doe-eyed and curious.
Twilight again thinks of his mother, always wise, always worried; ‘There’s a point, you know, for there being an end at all.’
He surely hopes not.
“Would you be my wife?”
Yor doesn’t say no.