Work Text:
It was a bad night.
Objectively speaking, it was a lovely evening. Family time had included Anya’s show and tell of her art project from school and the retelling of a playground dating saga that Loid was 90% sure was made up plot from Berlint in Love. The warmth of early summer had simmered down to a breeze-filled dusk, and there began a faint happy racket from the semi-annual carnival a few blocks down in the city square.
It had lasted throughout the evening- from the time that Twilight left work and continued through dinner, and subjectively speaking, that was the problem. Because by the time they had all sat down for dinner- the firework show began.
Loid did his very best to hide how close to the edge of his sanity he was as the worst of him and Twilight and the Boy From Before bled together with each shout, bang of metal, every whistle and discharge of the fireworks. His teeth nearly cracked from the pressure with which he clenched his jaw. He opened it only to shovel food in as quickly as he could and pepper in mindless comments to the family conversation.
He stood quickly when his plate was empty and, ignoring the worried looks from Yor and Anya, hastily announced that he wasn’t feeling well and would be retiring early.
Yor lowered her fork to her plate. “Oh. I’m sorry, Loid. Is there anything we can do for you?”
“No, thank you.” He avoided eye contact on his walk to the kitchen, focused on placing his plate in the sink and walking as normally as possible. “If you would, just leave the dishes and I’ll take care of them in the morning. Goodnight.” And with that, Loid was already halfway down the hall.
The door to his bedroom shut behind him a little harder than he intended. The wooden frieze rail thunked heavily when he threw his head back against it, chest rising and falling more rapidly than it should.
Through the reinforced door he was just able to make out an exchange between his wife and daughter.
“Papa’s weird tonight. Sus-fish-us.” Muted sounds of her small children’s utensils moving about as she spoke.
“Suspicious, Miss Anya. I think you mean ‘suspicious’. You should finish your dinner.”
“Okie dokie.”
Twilight stepped away from the door and took a seat at the end of his bed, before thinking better of it and moving to sit on the floor just below it. He didn’t like to touch his bed until he was able to shower and wash away the day and whatever mess it had entailed.
Deep breath after deep breath proved unhelpful in regulating the waves of memories, sensations, and phantom pains. He escalated then to the most effective way of grounding that he knew. A technique taught to new agents that he learned a millennia ago when he needed this kind of thing almost regularly.
His button up shirt came off and he lay flat on his back against the cold floor. Lights off, eyes closed, body still. Hands and shoulders relaxed, arms still by his sides. Mind cleared.
“Two, three, five, seven,” it was less of a whisper, more of an exhalation with each number- quiet enough that he could barely hear himself while still being said out loud.
As he started speaking, he tensed his muscles. Starting with his neck, then his shoulders, his abdominals, his hands. Slow. Meticulous. Practiced.
“Eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen,” Twilight continued, picturing a number line and the ascending numbers coinciding with the controlled rigidity of his body. The solid floor beneath him. The grain of the wood. The explosions that continued in the background.
“Cadet! Move your ass! We got contact right! Move to—” BOOM. Nothing. Then wet thuds as pieces of bodies of his comrades hit the blood puddles in mud like rain. He couldn’t hear well. Too much smoke to see.
Shit. Damn it.
They just weren’t stopping. How long are firework shows supposed to go on? How long had it been? No. Irrelevant. What was relevant was his exercise.
“Eighty-three, eighty-nine, ninety-seven.” Deep breath in, hold for sixty seconds. One, two, three-
“MEDIC!” His voice was scratchy, blood in his mouth. Couldn’t feel his body. “The Colonel’s down, we need a medic!” He heard a groan, some mangled version of a name. Not his, but he crawled with hands roaming in the mud ahead of him to reach the person he couldn’t see. He hit something stiff, jammed his pinky.
“Colonel?” Wet gasps, but no more words. “It’s going to be alright, there’s a medic inbound. I can try- I can carry you—” The boy fumbled through his waist pack, found a clean enough rag. Wiped his eyes and looked at his commanding officer. Immediately scrambled backward.
Half of his head was gone. His one remaining eye hung half-melted from its socket with nothing behind it. Body twitching, insides become outsides in the hematic plash. Bones, muscle, pink matter sprayed and seeping into the fabric of the boy’s uniform pants. Pieces of metal sticking out of places they couldn’t be pulled out of. There was half of an arm detached next to a stray boot. With the leg from the knee-down still in it.
Even if a medic were inbound, there was nothing to be said or done. The man was already gone- body moving in that post-mortem shut down from shock that couldn’t be processed. The ground was so thoroughly covered in blood and bodily fluids that it couldn’t even absorb any more.
The soldier turned his back and threw up.
Exhale. Then in for four seconds, hold for seven. Out for eight.
Again.
BOOM. Excited screams. His mother, a bloody mess wrapped in a blanket in a field.
Again.
BOOM. Shouting, sizzling of the firework as it bloomed into its design. A little girl with vacant eyes and a doll still in her hand.
Again.
BOOM. His best friend dying with a smile on his face and only three-quarters of a torso. “Give ‘em hell for me, yeah?”
One more time.
“Ninety-seven, eighty-nine, eighty-three, seventy-nine …” Twilight relaxed his toes, then calves, then quads.
“Sixty-seven, sixty-one, fifty-nine, fifty-three…” continuing back down from one hundred until he felt like a wet noodle, a deboned fish on the floor of his bedroom.
Lying limp and ears unhearing, Twilight ran through a list of tomorrow’s chores. Almost all were Loid’s. Handler had granted him a reprieve from side missions for the next two weeks. Something about new recruits taking jobs for more experience.
He needed to make a grocery run on the way home from work, make an apple tart for dessert to celebrate Yor’s promotion at work, Anya’s uniform needed to have the seam let out a little (since when did children grow so fast? Terribly inconvenient.), and there was one report left to type up by the end of the week. His weapons needed to be cleaned and oiled, too.
He could do that last one tonight instead; it would give him something to do with his hands. Be productive and-
No.
Definitely not.
Not when he was like this. Not when there was a little girl down the hall and his wife in the room next door. Not when he kept getting stuck back there.
It was horribly embarrassing. Humiliating.
The first time he had had an episode he was a green agent. A honeypot mission gone horribly wrong. Twilight came back with blood on his hands and wished that it had been his own. Sylvia unlocked his door (with a master key that he did not know existed- but privacy was always an illusion, after all) and talked him down from the edge of his bed. Tossed him to the floor and showed him how to navigate back into his body. Explained that it happened to everyone in their line of work- the trick was figuring out how to get out when you get sucked in.
Sylvia liked word exercises. Picking words from complicated literature tomes and breaking them down by root and origin. Twilight preferred numbers. Always had. They were clean, objective, unchanging and exempt from stigma via negative experience. So he memorized Pi to the five-hundredth digit, prime numbers to one thousand backwards and forwards. Gave each number a corresponding muscle group to tense and relax upon recounting. A roadmap- a bridge between head and present body.
There was a lot that Sylvia taught him. Saved him from. A lot that he owed her.
One thing that she stressed to him was to remain away from weapons until he could fully come back to the present- preferably after a good night’s sleep. (“When your head is at war, you fight against your surroundings. You’ll do something you regret if you try and win against an assailant that’s in the past.”)
He debated seeking comfort from the bottle he had stored away in the top shelf of his closet- but it would take far too much of it to calm him down and he didn’t want to deal with a hangover or worse: risk having his family see him inebriated. They deserve better than that.
And so Twilight found himself standing, righting his clothing, and tending to things that would ensure safety that he, deep down, knew was still preserved.
Peeking his head out the door, he saw that the apartment was dark. Twilight walked quietly down the hall to the kitchen, where the oven clock told him it was a little past midnight. He’d been in his room longer than he thought. The steady drip, drip, dripping sound of Bond’s water fountain was like background music for a dance that had become muscle memory.
The front door was locked. The handle didn’t budge, the deadbolt was engaged, and the chain in place.
Next checkpoint.
Beneath the couch, under the reinforced bottom and inside the cavity was his 9mm Walther PPQ- still secured in place with a full magazine and safety mechanism engaged. His emergency transponder and small pouch of international currencies were in their proper places as well next to the weapon.
Next checkpoint.
The doors to the balcony were locked with the extra deadbolt engaged and all panes of glass within the doors were clear of listening devices, marks, or cracks.
Next checkpoint.
He checked Anya’s room, where the window was locked, Bond kept watch, and the little girl’s breaths were deep and even. No bugs in there, either.
His own room was an easy one to clear. He had already completed a sweep when he got home (as he always did) and sure enough, all was still in order.
Yor’s room was a little different. She was such a light sleeper, he didn’t dare wake her up for something as silly as his nerves. There had been a few times they had fallen asleep together after a date night- usually on the couch after a few too many glasses of wine with their desserts- and she was quick to jerk awake at even the slightest disturbance. So, as carefully and quietly as he could, Twilight opened the door just a crack. Her window was closed, everything seemed as it should.
She grumbled something unintelligible and Twilight froze- praying to whatever god still cared that he could find a way to explain himself out of the situation.
‘Yor, please, I swear it’s not what it looks like. I wasn’t watching you sleep, I was just checking to make sure that you weren’t dead. Of course, nothing’s wrong I just had to do my house sweep in order- well, yes, I’ve done this before, but it’s not creepy I swear!’
To his everlasting relief, she stayed asleep, only flipping over to her other side and settling again.
Twilight sighed and closed the door again. He found himself walking back into the living room, though he was unsure why.
The fireworks had long since ceased and the carnival closed for the night- and yet, any kind of calm or peace still eluded him. He was far too anxious to try and sleep. He didn’t even feel comfortable sitting down. There was only so much that his incessant pacing could do. The nerves had him sweating. His clothes stuck uncomfortably to his chest, back, legs.
A shower, then.
It helped some to feel the warm spray on his body. There was something therapeutic about scrubbing himself clean. Someone told him once that dead skin sheds at such a rate that in seven years one’s body is ‘new’ again. A comforting notion, he thought. He wanted to be new. Different. That little boy and shellshocked soldier were gone. It was a soothing thought.
Twilight scrubbed at his body all the same- washing away the episode along with those ghosts he had already doffed. Faded scars faded some more and he made himself new by force. The closest thing to ‘gentle’ that he could manage to give himself was lotion afterward.
Time ticked by at a snail’s pace and yet his heart still beat more rapidly than it should. Twilight found himself sitting at his desk in his room, spinning a pen between calloused fingers, drawing mindless doodles and shapes. There were two filled sheets of paper next to the blank one he drew on- one with a shopping list and the other with a timed itinerary for the next day. Neither were really needed, but monotonous tasks helped.
The bottle of liquor seemed more and more appealing with each tick tick tick of the clock on his desk. He wanted to throw it out of his window. It taunted as it spun the hands around far past 3:00 AM without granting him pause or reprieve.
The thin pen snapped in his grip.
“Fucking…shit.” The ink he managed to mostly contain spilled only onto his papers, but a small spray splattered onto his crisp white sleep shirt. Twilight roughly pulled it off and threw it to the other side of the room. It fell somewhere by his closet door. He couldn’t care less if he tried. The soiled papers he crumpled up around the pen shell and threw bitterly into the wastebasket in the corner (he was grateful for the good aim after the rash anger spell had passed- he did not want to have stained the floors with ink).
He let out one long, rasped sound of frustration before slumping in his seat. The metronome clicking of the clock was not helping. Impulsivity possessed him again and he grabbed it, marched across the room, and buried in in his closet beneath a pile of sweaters.
His hands were shaking.
It was all so very juvenile. It made him so angry with himself. He was a fucking grown man. He had dealt with so many worse things than a bad night of no sleep. He was trained to steel his senses, forget his past, and go days without sleeping. It was bullshit. And it made him want to throw a tantrum like a child because why couldn’t he just fucking deal with it.
Silence was almost worse. With the clock gone, all he could hear was the blood rushing in his ears, the rushed beating of his heart. He stood there like a dumbass. Fight, flight, and freeze all running at once with no target. The only thing wrong was him. He was a child again. Standing, sputtering, waiting for someone to tell him what to do to make it all stop and knowing that there was no one coming.
And so he stood there- Twilight, in all of his fucking glory, hands empty and no idea how to get out of his head.
A creak sounded from the hallway. Twilight whipped his head towards his door, and then there was another. Breath stilled, he waited and darted his eyes to his bottom desk drawer- his service weapon loaded and ready within.
A tap on his door. Faint, soft, tentative.
He opened it carefully to reveal Anya, looking particularly small and… apologetic? Nervous? He couldn’t place it.
“Anya? What is it? What’s wrong?” He ducked his head out into the hallway and felt no relief upon finding everything just as normal as ever. He dropped to his knees, hands grabbing her arms, flitting over her to check for signs of physical harm.
“Papa, Anya had a bad dream.” She sniffled, dropped her gaze. “It was real scary.”
“Oh.”
Oh.
“Um…okay.”
Anya looked up at him for a second, her eyes all big and watery, then back down to Mr. Chimera held tightly against her chest. “Can Anya sleep in here tonight?”
There was a squeezing sensation in his chest. He was conflicted: as scarce as his interactions with children were in general, he had certainly never been around any when he had been so… not himself. What if he scared her? Or worse- hurt her? He would never forgive himself.
But just as Twilight was preparing the best way to tell her ‘no’, she lunged forward into his arms and wrapped herself around him as tightly as her little arms could manage.
“Anya loves her papa. He keeps us safe and makes all the scaries go away, too. So I need to stay here. Please?”
Oh. Well. That was…something. Before he could really register what he was doing his arms moved around her, too, and he was cradling her head against him. She smelled sweet in that weird way that babies and small children always do, mixed with the apple-scent of her shampoo and bubble bath. She was warm. He could feel her stuttering breaths against his bare chest.
Shit- he forgot to put a shirt back on. Hopefully she didn’t notice the scars that littered his torso. She was a little young to recognize scars from gunshot wounds and knives, but it was just good practice to stay covered up.
Anya stiffened a little suddenly, and Twilight found himself agreeing to her request before he could think it over any further
“Yeah, Anya. You can sleep in here.” Maintaining his hold on her, Loid stood and carried her to his bed. The blankets were pulled back and Anya was deposited gently onto the mattress. It wasn’t as soft as the mattresses he had gotten for her and Yor, but he hoped it wouldn’t be too uncomfortable for her. “Wait just a moment, alright?”
“Oui.” She busied herself with pulling the pillows around her and making what looked like a little nest.
While she was busy, Twilight took the opportunity to pull on a clean new sleepshirt before turning off his desk light and laying down on the bed as well. He was content to remain over the comforter- maintain a little barrier just in case he lost himself again- but Anya had other ideas, apparently.
“Papa, you’re gonna get cold. You have to sleep under the blankets.”
“I’m alright, Anya. Close your eyes.”
“Nuh uh.”
“Go to sleep, Anya. I’m right here.”
“No,” she drew out in a whine. “You’re too far away. I don’t know if I can sleep with Papa all the way over there. I think the scaries might come get me again…”
Loid sighed, suppressing an eye-roll. “Fine. But you have to go to sleep.”
Anya giggled (kind of maniacally? She was so odd sometimes) as she watched him situate himself underneath the blankets, and she was quick to ruin the neatness of her little nest to stick herself firmly to Loid’s side.
“Wait- gotta get Mr. Chimera,” she mumbled, reaching back for her plushie. Loid beat her to it, placing it between their bodies, and she made a little contented hum.
“Here you go, peanut. Now go to sleep.”
“Yes sir, agent Papa,” Anya answered with a silly little sleepy salute, making Loid smile.
She snuggled deeply into his side and pulled the comforter up to her chin. Her arm she draped across Loid’s torso in a hug. Turning towards her, he pulled her up to rest against his chest and wrap his arms around her and placed a kiss against the top of her head.
As they lay there in the quiet with the soft white noise of the overhead fan covering the night sounds of the city, Twilight found his mind wandering again. Back to his mother, back to his best friend, back to that little girl with the vacant eyes and bloody doll in rigor-stiffened hands. What was he doing to stop that from happening again? Did he have the right to lay there and sleep peacefully with his not-daughter while people were still starving and dying?
“Papa,” Anya grumbled, “Your noggin is too loud. Shush.”
“What?”
“Your brain thoughts are too loud to let me be sleepy. Shush.”
“…okay. Sorry?”
He really didn’t understand her sometimes.
Should he?
That was a failure on his part. Parents need to know their children. They need to strive to understand. It was a basic premise of the human condition, wasn’t it? Seeking to be understood and feel a sense of community with those around us?
“Paaappaaaaaaa.”
“Sorry, Anya.”
Anya leaned back to look at him with one eye peeked open. “You’re giving me a headbreak.”
“Headache.”
“You have to shush.”
She relaxed her head again and closed her eyes.
Relax, think of nothing. Relax, thing of nothing. Keep thinking of nothing. Stop not relaxing. Stop thinking and think about nothing. Be fucking normal.
Without the clock, he wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but what he did know was that he was starting to sweat again. Anya was heating up in the way that sleeping people did when they sank deeper into the lower cycles of REM. He wasn’t used to sharing a bed with anyone. It made him nervous to have her here- all fragile and trusting and unaware of the horrors plaguing him right before she came in.
Perhaps he should take her back to her room. Yes. That seemed prudent. Once she fell a little more solidly asleep. He didn’t want to risk waking her again.
Maybe he should go shopping for nightlights later in the week. Anya had insisted that she didn’t need one (“spies aren’t afraid of the dark, Papa,” she scoffed with a smirk) but it might bring her a little more comfort at night the next time she has another bad dream. Maybe something Bondman related. He was pretty sure he saw some of those at a department store not long ago. Nothing too infantilizing. He didn’t want her to be embarrassed.
Gone limp with sleep, she slipped a little- head hanging back off of his arm. He adjusted his hold on her. Cradled her in the crook of his arm.
It was still hard for him to see her as anything other than a baby, though. She was so small, even with how much she’d grown recently. Even compared to her peers. She confided in him one time that the group of boys that are friends with Desmond’s boy call her ‘shrimp’ and ‘stubby-legged’. And while that was cruel, it was still an evident fact that she was little. Trust elementary-aged children to use facts as insults.
No child ends up at an orphanage because they had gotten a good start at life. Perhaps she had suffered from malnutrition, or a degree of starvation. That was a common factor for stunted growth. Or maybe her biological parents were extremely short. Who could say? They would never know. What he did know was how to make sure that all of the meals that he prepared for her were as nutrient-dense as possible. Give her daily gummy vitamins. Make up for all the areas that were lacking to the best of his ability. Nothing could be undone, but he could give her as much of a boost now as he could.
Loid lifted a hand, wrapped it around one of hers. She could barely hold even three of his fingers. When they were walking and she asked to hold his hand, she normally held just his pointer and middle finger. So small. She’s just so little. So young, fragile. Her fingernails were painted a pale shade of green, a little more neutral than her eyes. Chipped a little already. She and Becky had attended a birthday party for one of their classmates at a high-end spa a few days ago. Anya was very proud, felt very grown-up. She came bursting in the door afterwards, yelling, “Look look look look look! Anya’s gotten all pretty!” The chocolate ice cream mustache she sported was part of the makeup, he was told.
All Loid could think about was how good it was to see her have fun with her friends, get excited about having a mini makeover.
Be a kid.
With a soft little smile, he looked down at her and thought about how different her childhood was from his. He was a rat child- an orphan living in gutters and rubble by the time he was her age. Subsisting off of scraps and charity from the government ‘rations’ until he was old enough to fake his way into the military.
And here she was, comforted back to sleep after a nightmare in the arms of a father caregiver that would have killed for her. Resting with her chubby little cheek smushed against him, drooling a puddle on his shirt with her favorite stuffed monster (where did she even get that thing?) safely by her side.
Maybe he had already. Killed for her, that is. He had fought tooth and nail to make it to this moment. And there was always that quiet voice in the back of his head wondering if he hadn’t adopted her, who would have? What would have happened to her if she had been ‘returned’ a fifth time? Who was going to fight for her, protect her, care enough?
He was going to have a hell of a time reporting the end of Operation Strix.
But one problem at a time, he reasoned. And for now, he was too tired to keep his eyes open.