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"When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve."
Ernest Hemingway
Time is a fickle thing and the novelty of being alone begins to wear off.
Days are busy with training and missions that have no mercy on his unsleeping soul. He keeps himself busy, and it's so easy. His terrifying boss lady says there’s endless potential in him, which seems like the perfect excuse to have him working all day—letting him sleep in a little departament that WISE rents for him.
Everything is new, and at the same time, it isn’t. It doesn’t feel as if he has really left the battlefield.
He still knows he should be grateful for everything he has. He’s alive, after all, with a roof and food, and a goal settled in life—or sort of, whatever keeps him busy and looking forward.
But sometimes, he wonders. And he knows it’s selfish. He has no one—even if his fellow agents and teachers are friendly enough. Still, he finds himself like a child again, wandering through memories, remembering the ghosts of old faces that scare him at night yet give him hope.
So he finds himself praying to whatever exists around him.
Please end this loneliness.
The day after he finishes his first solo mission, a child appears in front of his building.
Twilight is twenty-one years old when he gets his official codename.
And it’s also when he meets his daughter.
The first time he sees her, she’s hiding between fallen blocks. He looks at each side to find someone in the fog, anyone that is supposed to be with her, but he finds no one. That when he moves in the dawn gloom and walks towards the small trembling body while the taste of wet cigarettes spreads down his throat. When he approaches her, she flinches, and he expects her to run away and somehow end this all.
But she runs towards him, and climbs to his legs for dear life.
“H-help… pwease.”
But before he can take her in his arms, she passes away on the gravel.
His home is little and messy, stinking everywhere. He moves between pottery and clothes on the floor towards his tiny room, placing the little girl on his bed. He scans her with eyes fluttering like a nervous bird: the pink of her hair is opaque from the dirt, her black dress looks as if it has been almost torn off and her arms and legs are tattooed with little wounds, dry blood painted on her skin.
He wonders.
Clicking his tongue, he takes the first aid kit from under his bed and takes the dirty blankets away from her tiny body. Bandages and cotton are placed around her and in a murmur, he curses to himself; he never wanted to do this again—to find the wounded and treat them, to see another life trembling on his hands. It awakens too many ghosts, little habits that he has soon forgotten. Nevertheless, he bandages her arms and legs, and cleans the blood from her skin. There aren’t many wounds, but the amount is already alarming for someone like her—she’s a little, fragile thing, and his heart whispers something that he refuses to listen to.
With a sigh, he stares at her for a while, wondering what to do—perhaps take her to a hospital when the storm stops, or call WISE. He scratches the back of his head and with another tired sigh, he heads to the kitchen, letting her sleep.
Yet it’s not an hour later when she hesitantly walks towards his messy kitchen with wandering eyes, peeking behind the door of his room.
She doesn’t look scared anymore.
He wonders.
Her big green eyes are reddish from her crying, and with hesitation, she extends her arms and makes a muffled noise close to a cry. All he can do is stare at her for long seconds, until she makes another noise, and he puts his cigarette away. Hesitatingly he walks towards her, and before he can take her in his arms, she’s hugging his legs with a force that almost makes him fall.
That’s when she starts to cry—and his heart aches with memories hurting his lungs.
He blinks again, taken aback, finally carrying her in his arms. “There, there, shh . It’s alright now.”
She tugs on the shirt over his shoulders as her little tears wet his exposed skin. Hugging her in a weak hold, he notices how skinny she is under him, alarming him. He rubs his hand on her back until her cry softens and she moves to stare at him, her big green eyes gazing at him in wonder, almost in awe.
There’s a smile on her now blushed face—as if she has finally found something she has lost.
Her name is Anya and she has run away from home.
That’s what Twilight understands between her tiny voice and her mouth full of the food he has prepared for her. He asks her over and over what happened to her, who hurt her like this, where is her home. But each time he asks, her eyes shine like haunted lakes about to burst in tears, and the logical part of him tells him perhaps he has to take it easy with her.
He sighs—he’s not good with children.
I wonder how old she is.
Suddenly she stops eating.
Then she looks at him—big eyes with stars swimming in green, reading through him.
Anya raises her little hand, and shows two fingers, as if making a peace sign.
“Two”, she says as she chews.
Twilight blinks, taken aback.
Is she trying to say she’s two years old?
Anya looks at him, and nods.
Twilight blinks again.
It’s almost as if—
The storm never stops.
That night he decides to prepare the bed for her. He will deal with this tomorrow, he sighs. He puts the cleanest sheets he can find, and places her on the bed.
“I’m sorry it’s not much”, he sighs, a bored expression on his face as he puts his arms on his hips.
Anya fixes herself under the sheets, unable to stop smiling.
“Cozy.”
“If you say so…”
He turns to walk towards the door, headed to the couch, until he finds her little hand tugging on his shirt.
“Papa stays.”
Papa?
“I’m not papa”, he frees himself with an irritated expression. “And I’m sleeping on the couch tonight.”
Anya pouts, her little lower lip shivering as tears fill her eyes.
“No crying”, he pats her head. “You’re safe here, so now go sleep.”
He turns off the lights and leaves the door open for the light to flirt through the room.
Minutes later, she’s happily cuddling against him on the couch.
The night has claws and it awakens his insomnia. There, he can see the tears she drops in her sleep. It reminds him of having nightmares every night—the reason why he hates to sleep. With a sigh and the feeling of warm water filling his lungs, he hugs her against his chest and hums the lullaby that sounds in the ruins of his childhood, until her breath becomes even, and she’s hugging him back. And he wonders. He wonders all the time.
The next morning, he tries to fix her dress as best as he can.
Twilight clicks his tongue as he needle makes his thumb bleed for the fourth time, thinking to himself that he isn’t here for this. He has orders to attend, and training to complete. All he knows in life is the feel of a weapon on his hands, cold and dusty as he bleeds, and he feels strange and silly to be doing this as he sits on his old, torn couch.
“After I’m done with this”, he talks out loud so she can hear, “we're going out.”
Anya gasps from the bathroom, where she’s happily swimming on the warm bathtub he has filled for her. “ A-venture ?!”
“No, no. It’s just going out and— shit ,” he hisses when the needle marks his skin again.
The sooner he can end this the better, he thinks to himself.
Yet when he takes her to the orphanage, she runs away. And he makes many attempts to leave her there.
But every time, Anya runs away from him—and Twilight has gotten used to the fact that even if he loses her from his sight, he will find her in the door of his departament. Somehow, she has learned her way back there.
Twilight wonders how he got himself in this situation as he groans on his hands, Anya happily eating a bowl of cereal in front of him.
Then he remembers that she has run away—and he wonders if he should ask. But he doesn’t. Because he won’t allow himself to care again.
On the fourth day of his attempt, he calls Franky for help.
“What’s this?”
“This is a child”, he says with a bored expression.
“Name! Anya!”, she happily exclaims.
“No , duh, I know that”, Franky drops his cigarette. “What I mean is, what the hell is this situation?”
Twilight sighs exasperated. He combs his messy hair back, explaining the whole situation. As he talks, he feels Anya’s little hands tugging on his pants, hiding from Franky as she watches them both with curiosity and wonder.
Franky stares at him taken aback.
“Just drop her somewhere safe, dude.”
“Don’t you think I tried ? She keeps coming back to me, she has run away and…”
As they keep arguing, Anya looks at Franky, then at him, and she keeps going until she has that knowing stare in her eyes where galaxies bloom—as if she knows something else. And when she speaks, Twilight is the one taken aback.
“Scwuffy got a gwifiend?”
They both look at her, Franky blinks.
“What?”
“Scwuffy”, Anya stares at Twilight and points at his friend. “Busy. He has a da-te .”
Twilight frowns at this, unsure what she means, but next to him, Franky opens his eyes and mouth in awe, almost scared.
“Uh-how did she know? Did you tell her? How do you know?! Why did you tell this brat?!”
“Scwuffy. Dumped.”
Franky shakes him by the shoulders. “How?!”
“Calm down, dammit,” Twilight frees himself and looks at her with a confused look. “Anya, what are you saying? Why are you making stuff up?”
Anya is taken aback, scared, as if she has said something wrong. “T-that’s what Scwuffy was swaying.”
They both blink.
“But I never said it out loud.”
Twilight doesn’t stop looking at her even as Franky whispers to his ear dude, this kid is cursed. Anya blinks confused and scared, taken aback, as if she has said something that she shouldn’t have. He wonders deeply. A part of his mind tries to find the logic, but he fails.
Anya clings to his legs, and apologizes.
When Franky drops her at his place after babysitting her for hours, she won’t let go of him as she hugs him desperately.
Twilight wonders how he will be able to let her go.
In the rainy afternoon, he finds himself almost out of money—so he gets her the only things he can afford, a bag of peanuts. She watches it in wonder and unsure, but when her eyes shine in a puddle of excitement, he sighs in relief.
Then he gets her home, and lets her sleep. And he wonders what he’s doing—learning to parent a child as he learns to be a spy; and how his life could have been if he had found her earlier, if he would have found this duty that keeps him alive, if this is really enough.
And it is, it is . He won’t allow himself to wish for more.
Anya can read minds.
It’s not until his twelfth attempt to leave her somewhere else when he deciphers her secret. He doesn’t mean to, at first. He refuses to believe it.
Whenever he’s having a thought, she answers back. Somehow, they’re having a sort of conversation without him talking—and there’s no other possible explanation for this in all his logic and overthinking. He feels freaked out at first, thinking that he had already seen everything, but when Anya looks at him with tears in her eyes he tries to hold his reaction back.
He wonders if she’s aware of what she can do.
“Anya”, he calls her in the calmest tone he can find. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
She tilts her head. “What is Anya doing?”
“You’re seeing what I’m thinking.”
Anya blinks again, confused, and reaches the conclusion that she’s truly not aware. He would ask her how she got this power—if only she were aware too, he would help her, let her find some place safe. Twilight remembers then her constant run away from any home and any place he got her, and his only conclusion is that this strange ability has given her problems in the past.
A part of him is tempted to react like the rest—but he holds himself back, learning to lean into the patience and hardships from his training.
You’re a spy now, Twilight. Calm yourself.
“Papa. Spy?”
Damn it.
“Anya”, he fixes himself in his seat, and looks at her with a soft seriousness in his eyes. “Where did you run away from?”
The calmness in her eyes melt away as she shivers again, and she tugs on his shirt, as if a monster is coming to get her.
“Bad guys. Lab.”
He blinks as she hides her face on his chest. “Lab?”
Anya nods with her face buried on his shirt. “White evewywhere. Bad guys.”
At this he tries to think back, and Twilight wishes he could read her mind instead. He tries to process everything as he hesitatingly hugs her back, and a foggy part of his mind remembers the clandestine experiments made back during the war, how every soldier knew but shutted their mouths about it. He feels a rude tug on his chest, a foreign sort of anger awakening inside of him. He still doesn’t understand, far from it, but he hugs him back and he tries not to regret the words that slide from his mouth.
“It’s alright now. You’re with me. You’re safe.”
He wonders how much he believes his own words.
Twilight decides to keep her secret, and he teaches her the dangers of saying out loud what other people are thinking.
He tries to adjust to the situation: accept this ability that she has, trying to teach her what a mind is, the difference between thinking and speaking, and why she has to hold herself from answering to whatever thought she can sense.
Anya slowly learns, patient and careful.
He feels a pride on his chest that shouldn’t be there.
He knows it’s time to present this situation to his Handler.
When he shows up at the base with Anya holding his hand, she stares at them both with elegance and seriousness, her legs and arms crossed in the same way as always.
“So”, she says in her authoritative tone, “you have been hiding this from your agency, agent?”
Twilight flinches, clearing his throat.
“Let me explain”, he moves his hand towards Anya. “This child is lost, and she shouldn’t be given to the wrong hands.”
His boss doesn’t move or make an expression, and Twilight takes this signal that he should continue explaining. And he does, while Anya walks around the room and stares at the files and pictures and photographs in the wall with wonder and awe. When he’s finished, Handler gets on her feet, walking towards Anya exploring a briefcase.
“Hello, dearest, what’s your name?”, she smiles.
Anya flinches, looking at him, and when Twilight nods at her, she speaks with her little hands squeezing her dress. “A-anya.”
“Anya. What an adorable name”, Handler tilts her head, and extends her hand as she kneels to her level. “Nice to meet you, my name is Sylvia.”
Anya stares at her hand, then at him, then back again to her and points, “Pwetty.”
Handler blinks, and laughs out loud in a way Twilight hasn’t before—not in the one year he has known her. She takes Anya in her arms and she hugs her back, happy and soft and free from any fear—making him feel relieved. His boss gets on her feet with Anya in her arms and as she lets herself enjoy the warmth of her little arms hugging around her neck, she gives Twilight a determined look.
“Alright. We will handle this situation for as long as we can. We can’t let her fall in the wrong hands. If you have taken care of her for a while, let’s keep it that way—but let it now interfere with your duty, Twilight.”
He nods. And he wonders why a part of him feels so relieved by her words.
When they come back home, it feels natural.
As if it’s meant to be.
Months come by like leaves in the fall and routine gets mixed in the way of his risky life. Some days, Anya has to stay somewhere else when his missions are of long-term periods. Other days, they’re together for weeks and he barely gets any sleep between the missions and cooking for her, cleaning her, buying her peanuts and getting a television so she can watch the cartoons like every other kid. He does his best into giving her the mundane life she deserves, but Anya wonders about his job, and sooner or later he’s bound to let her know about it.
It’s in his mind, after all.
Anya calls herself the daughter of a spy, and he doesn’t know how to feel about it.
Her pride is contagious.
During her first birthday, he buys a peanut cake and a comic book called Spy Wars. Anya has never known about it before, but when she starts reading, she’s making a tantrum for him to buy her the next ones. She plays spies and pretends that this guy named Bondman is there with her, making him internally chuckle.
Anya learns to love and keep his secret, and he lets her into his life as he learns to control his thoughts so she doesn’t peek at the shadows that she isn’t supposed to see.
There are long periods of times where he has to leave her with Franky—and he tries to ignore the hole on his chest. He spends his days and nights acting as someone else—living other names, other sorrows, other joys. Laying on a bed that isn’t his, wearing a mask that isn’t his face, he thinks about home—and it’s such a foreign feeling, this blanket coating his memories at night. But he thinks and thinks and thinks—and then he wonders what does this all mean. He tells himself that this is all he can be, all he ever will—this is the path he slowly and patiently draws for himself. Solitude. Dryness. Exile.
But then he comes back to his little home, and Anya is there. She runs towards his arms and Twilight wonders who is moving the strings of his arms that open big and happy to hug her. He wonders, yet he smiles. He laughs at Anya’s muffled yells against his chest as she hugs him back, all clean and adorable in her new blue dress, tugging his shirt with her little hands. Then all duty and lies are gone like leaves from the wind and he thinks that this is it—his whole identity. This is who he is, this is all he ever will be.
And sinks into it.
She’s watching the snowfall from the window as she sits on his lap.
He’s lecturing her about something, but he knows that she isn’t really listening—she’s reading his mind. That’s when he tries to stop thinking, to focus, to not make her mind dizzy enough. A part of him thinks, you’re important to me, please stay safe . He wants to slap himself because that’s wrong wrong wrong—he can’t care, he can’t slip into it.
But then Anya draws her smile of strawberries, and her eyes shine like sunshine on water.
There’s a nostalgia in her that he can’t decipher.
“I missed you a whole lot, papa.”
It’s the first time he has heard these words in decades, and he has to swallow the words that want to slip from his mouth.
He wonders.
“It’s okay”, she cuddles against his chest, closing her eyes. “I kwnow what papa is swaying on his head, and I love you, too.”
He wonders all the time.
WISE has practically adopted her as well. She receives praise and gifts whenever he has to take her there because Franky can’t babysit. The agents gift her with peanuts and candies, and Anya whispers in awe, papa’s workpwace is paradwise as Handler picks her in her arms and nuzzles her cheek against hers. Then they come back home, and he tries to cook her a meal from a recipe book he has bought as she reads old comic books on his torn couch. It’s terrifying and domestic.
Anya learns to keep his secret and he knows to keep hers.
For such a small child, she knows to keep them—she has gotten used to it, after all. A part of him feels guilty and insecure.
There are long days when he has to leave in order to achieve the goal of a mission, and Anya stares at his preparation with awe: watching her papa putting on a mask, faking a voice, wearing a completely different name. She has met Roy, Lawrence, Robert and Lionel. She has met many strange guys—but it’s alright, she says, because they’re all her papa.
Then Twilight drops her at Franky’s or at a neighbor’s, and his heart feels heavy and dusty as he has to leave her.
He wonders if it’s alright to feel like this.
Then one night, he finds the answer as a bullet opens its path through his blood.
When the melody of his heartbeat becomes calmer and slower, he doesn’t panic about his life. He thinks about the little sunshine living in the darkness of his messy home, and he thinks to himself that this isn’t fair to her. That he can’t do this—and he blames himself when he crawls on the ground and takes his gun, fighting back.
He thinks about his daughter and he feels lost in a forest.
And it’s alright to feel this lost between the trees and the fog, unaware of everything, even when his eyes close empty of pain and his fellow agents run towards him.
When he awakes, she’s the first face he sees.
Anya is crying more than when he first found her.
She clings to him to dear life, and Handler has to steady her so she doesn’t throw herself over his wounded body. Her cries and screams echo in the room like a wounded bird. Then the feeling of being lost goes away—and he makes a sign to his boss that it’s alright, that she can let his daughter hug him with all she got even if it hurts.
Then his shivering hands are on her little back, and he’s the one to soothe her.
Lullabies bloom from his words.
“It’s alright now, papa is here”, he murmurs, holding back the tears on his throat.
And he doesn’t wonder anymore.
To live in the gap between the moment that is expiring and the one that is arising, luminous and empty. He remembers what his mother taught him about love, and he understands that this is it. Maybe this is all there is and it is enough.
Anya is five years old and she learns to wait for him just as he learns to stay alive for her.
Duty is all he has—and it’s alright, because she means duty for him too.
He comes back late at night from a mission and she’s there, her little head resting on the table surrounded by drawings and crayons. Twilight draws a tired smile on his face as he pats her head and carries her to the little bed, glad that he’s alive one more day. In the drawings, he can decipher a picture of him dressed as a police officer, in another, him with his spy suit and holding her hand—he’s everywhere. He tucks her in bed and kisses her on the top of her head, combing her hair as he whispers in the night, “I love you, my little bonehead.”
One year later, something called Operation Strix comes to light.
She has stars swimming in her eyes as she listens in excitement.
“Anya finally gets a mama?”
Twilight learns the hardships even when Anya becomes a part of this new mission, ready to make her study for real so she can enter an academy that feels scary to both of them.
It’s moments like these where he feels more like a father than a spy. Or maybe he’s both. He’s some sort of spy-dad, like Franky calls him in a teasing tone, or whatever the hell that means. Years later, he still learns how to be both as he works and stays alive and cooks homemade meals every night. But this is his life now, and he’s content—it’s a farewell to the old vagabond life, to the battlefield as his only exile.
And he thinks, mirthful and calm, that he can have this.
It’s the same feeling he gets when he meets his wife in a certain shop, lying to her but telling the truth when the thought about how beautiful she is slips from his mouth. He talks to her and slowly builds his plan. But then he sees his daughter, and she has a knowing smile on her face, and suddenly he gets the same sensation he got from back when he found her in the rain and the ruins.
The beautiful woman with red eyes smiles at Anya, and his daughter is a bundle of happiness. And Twilight thinks to himself that this is it—a farewell to solitude, and the road back home. This is enough.