Chapter Text
Securing access to the Schlosshotel Berlint proved easier than Twilight had anticipated given the security that had been set in place, for much the same reason that he and Franky had been able to infiltrate the hotel and plant their multitude of surveillance devices. The entire contingent of guards, whose eyes were almost uniformly concealed by dark sunglasses that seemed rather impractical, were loaded up into the hallway and rooms near suite 17. They were a twitchy and paranoid gaggle of thugs, despite the knock-off high-fashion suits afforded them by their employer, but all their focus seemed to be on the main entrance and hallways, which they had barricaded with fallback positions for groups of their men, as if they suspected a frontal blitzkrieg assault from an opposing army.
Even Twilight wouldn't have been able to break through those defenses through brute force alone.
However, myopia was a weakness, and strength in one area inevitably resulted in a diminishment of forces in another. As the great strategist's counsel went: “the way is to avoid what is strong, and strike at what is weak.” And Twilight was quite good at picking apart other's weaknesses with a scalpel and tweezers. Spycraft was, after all, the very distillation of the maxim that the supreme art of war was to subdue the enemy without fighting.
So, with the knowledge of his rival's identity in hand, he merely concocted a passable disguise by way of largely accurate coloured contact lenses and a prosthetic mask, fashioned hastily with the tools on hand in the 'hospital' basement. Hartmann's lieutenant, Bruce Boxlighter, – the real man having been dropped off with Westalis intelligence since Twilight was going to ruin Harmann's whole career – passed all the defenses utterly unmolested. Quite unlike most of the girls whom the scum favored when visiting particularly repugnant brothels the world over. That thought had Twilight contemplating just dropping the charade and murdering every man he passed.
Quietly, of course, picking them off one by one.
He had to make use of that collection of execution techniques somehow, didn’t he?
He regretted that Hartmann had only one life to give in service of Twilight’s country.
But there was no time for such indulgence; he had a mission to complete, and a wife to… save?
He'd have to find out.
Subduing Hartmann was, in fact, almost effortless once Twilight slipped into his room under the pretense of discussing developments in the negotiation with a cabal of doomsday cultists who insisted that they had to exterminate the entire population of a New England coastal fishing town that had fallen into decadent disrepute in the late 1890s because it was inhabited by some form of batrachian subspecies of human beings that were the product of miscegenation with an immortal race of undersea frog-men…
Odd the things that Boxlighter had told them, but his story – about the doomsday cultist if not the fish-men – checked out.
A swift and decisive blow to the back of Hartmann's head when he turned to the mini-bar to retrieve whisky left the man thoroughly unconscious, and, despite his corpulence, easily secured with some rope to a dining room chair, ankles neatly duct-taped to the chair legs, and mouth similarly sealed shut. Securely blindfolded, he wasn't even able to see Twilight peel off his mask and rub away the residual sticky gunk from behind his ears.
Originally, the plan had simply been to put a bullet in the back of the man's head, but that was before the revelation of his true identity and, perhaps, the one of the man behind the mask of Twilight.
Yor might never know what name the facade of Loid Forger concealed, but he now realized that that man hadn't even been honest with himself. Of course that made a good deal of sense. After all, there were few people that one lied to with more frequency than oneself.
And now?
Now was the time for honesty.
Unfortunately for Twilight, he had very little practice, or familiarity, with honesty.
So, with Hartmann bound and gagged, Twilight waited, standing by the window should he need to rely on defenestration to make a quick escape, with his silenced pistol in hand.
His timing having been precise like clockwork, he didn't have to wait long for Yor to arrive, the door to the hotel room bursting open as if she was in a rush, to reveal his wife. As he'd suspected, even as his stomach fell and he twisted to conceal his pistol from her view, not wishing to scare her even more than was necessary, she had changed since last he saw her earlier in the day. The revealing black dress, which even an unattached and dispassionate agent had noticed was immensely flattering when first they went out for dinner with Anya, hugged her curves and emphasized her lean and supple thighs as it swished dramatically before she stormed in, the security mechanism of the door causing it to swing closed behind her.
"Heinrich Hartmann, may I have the-"
Whatever it was that Yor was trying to say by way of greeting to her paramour was cut off with a choked gasp, the cool reserve that rarified and refined her features giving way to open-mouthed shock and a modicum of terror. The expression pained him for her sake, much as her betrayal had wounded him deeper than even the pair of ... pin-like knives clutched in her hands ever could.
Pin-like knives?!
Just what was she doing with this degenerate?!
"L- w-what are you-" She shook her head as if trying to clear the ringing in her ears after a grenade went off danger-close. "How?"
"How is not important," the Westalian agent stated primly.
Yor stumbled at that, staggering forward with her arm rising up as if in a plea. "But I-"
"What matters now is this." Twilight pointed the muzzle of his silenced pistol towards the squirming, gagged reprobate, worse than he'd ever imagined, bound to the wooden chair by the windowsill.
Yor clenched up on her knives, her nostrils flaring as if she was an enraged bull. "I ... that's- he's why I'm here."
"Oh, yes,” Twilight said, noting the razor-sharpness of her eyes and resisting the urge to squirm. “I know."
"You do?"
"Of course. You're my wife." Loid took no pleasure in the way that Yor flinched like a kicked puppy that he wanted to scoop up into his arms and cuddle, telling her that she was a good girl, a pretty girl, a lovely voluptuous – It wasn't time to think of such things now. “I know exactly why we’re here.”
“Y- you're not with him?” she asked with a release of breath, slumping. A nearly manic giggle rose up from her throat. “Ridiculous. Of course not.”
“I'm here for you,” Twilight stressed, voice wavering at the revelation. “You couldn't hide this from me forever."
"I- I can’t believe you-” Yor bit her lip before taking an exceptionally long, calming breath to steel herself for what Twilight could only consider a bizarre quasi-couple's spat before their quite literally captive audience. “It wasn't supposed to be forever."
Nothing lasted forever, of course. Twilight's chin rose to project a degree of smirking arrogance and stave off the desire to go hug his distraught wife. "Then how long was it supposed to last?"
"I've thought about stopping every time,” Yor strained out, beginning to pace the room, eyes flitting back and forth rapidly between him, the door, and Hartmann, “but- but I just couldn't..I started so young, and it was so- so easy at first when I told myself that it was all for Yuri. That I was doing something good."
"But you had me ,” Twilight insisted, clutching up on his pistol even as he tried to suppress the unjustified, emotional quiver to his voice. For her, he had to be better than that. “I ... I would have given you anything that you needed."
She flinched from his gaze, sheathing those long knives in a pair of specially-designed holsters on her thighs, rendered bare as her lithesome legs hiked upwards and Twilight was irrationally relieved that he'd blindfolded Hartmann, however many times he already gotten to see more than this.
"I got ... caught up in it,” his wife said softly, folding her arms to hug herself. “I didn't know how to stop. It's just... been a part of me – been me for too long."
"I suspected as much. Then... I need you to know-" Twilight inhaled a calming breath, allowing the scent of pine, whisky, and cigar smoke to fill his lungs. There really was only one thing that he could do. Marital relationships called for compromise and mutual sacrifice. "That it's okay."
"It- what ?"
"I don't care what you've done," Twilight declared with a serious tone and toss of his arm, everything about him utterly dripping with bathos.
"But-"
"I can't imagine what was done to you as a child. What you were forced to experience just to survive, and I don't mean to be patronizing either, but it's as I told you the night that we agreed to marry. Who you are, and the sacrifices that you've made, are a credit to you. The scars you carry deserve to be seen, and ... touched gently-” His gaze rose to the ceiling; despite all the masterful deceptions he had effected throughout his career, no matter how odious or manipulative the skein of lies he unraveled around the throats of heiresses and enemy agents whose deaths he was plotting, nothing had been as bitterly hard as this single moment that left his heart hammering, his blood boiling like a caustic acid ready to eat through his flesh.
Because all the pretense and all the lies and all the thousand, thousand diaphanous shields of Loid Forger and Twilight, each as thin as the layers of an onion, were falling away in this one moment of ... vulnerability.
Twilight didn't allow himself to be vulnerable.
Twilight was the bulwark against the world and the self, keeping everything out and everything in.
“And,” he choked on the word and then found strength and courage by turning his face from the wood panel ceiling to gaze on her. Of course, Yor, even standing there agog and befuddled in her revealing dress, fingers nearly bruising her upper arms with the force of her grip, made it easy. “And your scars only make me love you more."
Going slack-jawed, she gasped like an agent breaching the surface of the water after an aquatic insertion for a mission. "You- you love me?"
"I have for a very long time.” Twilight smiled ruefully at himself. “It merely took... this for me to realize it."
"And you still love me... despite it?" Her voice cracked as she spoke, ruby eyes glistening in a way that made him want to kiss a trail around them until the lids fluttered closed in contentment, just so they could open again, bright with warmth.
"I do,” Twilight insisted as gently as he could muster while watching his wife tremble, her face pinching up even as her eyes blew wide with shock and awe of the sort that might result from a wide-scale bombing campaign. “It matters to me only insofar as it's affected you, because... because you're the one who matters to me. I realized that when I started to think about what he'd done to you. How... gentle and kind you could be after suffering as you have. Each day, every new inch I see, I only become more... awed."
Her reaction was muted, though he took it as a good sign that she stepped towards him gingerly, waving around the corpulent cur confined to his chair. A keen intelligence shone from her focused eyes as she mulled while Twilight awaited her reaction to the revelation, his intestines twisting up like he'd been put on the very torture rack that he'd envisioned – and sketched – for her mystery lover.
"I- I don't know what – what that kind of love is,” Yor admitted in a soft voice, tremulous with a kind of restrained vulnerability, like his vibrant and indefatigable and lusty – No. Not lusty. Scratch that. – wife was a wine glass, transparent and ready to shatter with the right tone. “Anya, Yuri, Ostania. Even Bond. I love them, but-"
Twilight wasted no time in extending his free hand, palm open in invitation. "I don’t know if I understand it either, but … we can find out together, if you want to?"
She smiled at him, and the sight was like drinking liquid honey, saccharine but going down smooth and refreshing as cool spring water. "I do."
A cocked brow answered her. "Apt."
"I- I suppose so," she said with a charming little giggle of embarrassment as she slipped her fingers along his palm, tracing the stitched seam of his white glove.,
"Then the only thing that remains is him.” Twilight turned to gaze at the shuffling pile of human excrement beside them. Much as he longed to simply do away with him summarily, a man did have to take his wife's feelings into account.
For the mission.
Which was now, apparently, saving his marriage.
“What do you- what are your feelings about … this?" Twilight asked.
"It was never about feelings.” Yor's assurance was just the cool spring rain, tumbling down from the heavens like a divine gift, that Twilight needed to put out the fire in his throat. Of course, she had to go re-stoking it tenfold by what she said next with shocking flippancy. “It was the job, something I felt that I had to do, and was proud to do for Yuri, but recently it's just been... because I don't know how to do anything else."
"So this was... forced." Somehow, he managed to keep the pure and unbridled rage from twisting up his voice, merely due to the thought that an untoward expression of aggression might frighten his occasionally overly-sensitive wife.
"Well... under some degree of duress,” Yor admitted, seeming to note the increased tension in his shoulders and giving his hand a squeeze to mollify him.
"I see.” Twilight pursed his lips and steeled himself for the task ahead, already distracting his racing and nearly unruly mind, a rarity for him, by creating a mental catalog of all the psychologists and therapists in Berlint and WISE's employ to whom he could introduce his wife. She deserved the best as she worked through the long process of recovery from the nightmare of a life of exploitation at the hands of vermin like Hartmann. “Then I will take on the responsibility of killing him. You'll never be safe if he's alive and free."
"You- you'd do that for me?” Yor gasped, tugging free her hand to clasp them both over her mouth in what Twilight only hoped was not a show of abject disgust. Honesty now, though, was all he could offer. Her next words were muffled by her fingers. “But you're a doctor. A- a good man. A healer."
"I'm your husband, and, to be fair, he runs an ...” Twilight licked his lips and then offered a euphemism through gritted teeth. “Odious business. It's nothing less than he deserves."
Yor nodded as if he'd just told her that they should take second avenue on the way home from the Berlint opera house to save time with traffic, like murder was a mundane thing. “You're right, of course."
Strange and disquieting. Still, he had a responsibility to preserve his wife's innocence.
"Perhaps you should leave.” The offer of escape was punctuated by a broad sweep of his hand towards the hotel room door. “This isn't something that you need to see."
Much to his surprise, Yor just waved him off like he was Anya, saying that she was going to eat nothing but peanuts for every meal, just like an el-elf-ant.
"Oh, that won't be necessary. Like you said, not after everything I've already been through." Her crystalline clear laughs rang out like a harmonious series of wedding bells tinkling.
It was possible that Loid had underestimated the horrors that Yor had witnessed as a child and teen. Prostitution was typically associated with organized crime, at least when it involved someone who could draw in high-class customers (Twilight made a note to take up a hobby that involved the systematic elimination of organized crime in Berlint).
She may have been exposed to just a smidgen more violence than he'd suspected.
After the execution was, well, executed with a single clean shot to the back of Hartmann’s head for expediency's sake, after which Twilight made certain to retrieve the shell casing, the Westalian agent turned back to his wife.
"Now, shall we head home?" he asked while joining her at the door, only moderately distracted by the starry-eyed expression on her face that almost made her look like a child.
Considering the thoughts he’d been having about her curling up in his lap like a buxom puppy, the neoteny was slightly disconcerting.
Yor put a hand to her heart as if it was threatening to beat its way out of her chest, and sighed wistfully. "Loid, that was so… efficient."
"I ... suppose," Twilight offered hesitantly. An odd compliment considering the situation, but Yor might still be in shock.
"You know, given how you sneaked into the hotel and killed Hartmann so easily, you have a lot of potential," Yor offered with an inexplicable degree of chipperness and even less fathomable dusting of rouge on her cheeks, as if she was thoroughly proud of her baby boy for having gotten a gold star on his assignment in kindergarten.
Twilight's brow quirked as he paused while taking hold of the door handle, a shiver creeping up his spine. "What do you mean?"
Yor's hands clasped together before her chest while a sequel of excitement that Twilight committed to memory so that he could be certain to encourage her to make precisely that same sound again bubbled up from her throat. "Well, after you get some training, we could go on missions!"
"What missions?" Loid asked slowly with a cracking smile, which was somewhat appropriate since it felt like his skull was going to split open as his brain was overheating.
And not just because of the smooth alabaster flesh that was completely exposed along Yor's throat and bosom, or the burst of honeysuckle perfume that tickled his nose erotically.
Yor looked at him, apparently uncertain.
"As assassins?"
A quick mental recategorization of available data transpired at that juncture.
Around the same time that Twilight realized that he was an unfathomable dumbass, but as he did with many facts, he suppressed the acknowledgement of it.
Just swept it under the mental rug where it would find a nice home next to the repressed childhood trauma.
Pausing to brace his back against the wall beside the hotel room door, Loid raised his fingers to his temple and squeezed as if trying to crush his own skull.
"Assassins?"
"Yes.” In confusion that scrunched up her face, still flushed with ... something that Loid didn't want to think about until they'd returned to their apartment, Yor blinked those radiant ruby eyes, a match for the streak of actual human blood that had actually splashed over her cheekbone and that he felt compelled to wipe away with a gloved thumb. “You figured me out, and, oh! You'll be so dashing in one of the Garden's tuxedos. We'll make such a lovely pair."
Loid stared at her for roughly sixty seconds, all of which she seemed to spend caught up in some girlish fantasy, a faraway look in her glazed eyes, before he shrugged and offered her his arm in a gentlemanly fashion.
"You know what?" Loid began as he fired off a pistol shot dead-center into the forehead of a guard, who had been hiding in an adjoining room and burst out on them with a knife, poised to sink it into Yor's throat. Late, but at least he showed he had spirit before he gave up the ghost. A thrown dagger also embedded itself in the dead man's heart before the bullet had finished passing through his skull.
At which point Yor may have transitioned from pink-faced to fully beet red and taken a firmer hold of his arm, setting her head to his shoulder and sighing as she snuggled into him before, together, they strode out into the hallway.
A hallway littered with corpses of nondescript suited bodyguards, none of whom, it seemed, had even had a chance to fire off a shot despite their preparations.
Quieter than a silenced pistol.
"Yes, Loid?" his darling wife murmured peacefully, cuddling him, as another two guards, who sprung upon them from a hotel room to their left, caught miniature throwing knives to their jugulars and two silenced shots center mass of their chests.
Yor fanned herself lightly with a hand, though that did nothing to dispel the apparent heat from her face... and now her bosom because the flush had spread all the way down to her boobs.
Agent Twilight of the Westalis Intelligence Service Eastern Focused Division, the pride of his nation and scourge of Ostanian dictators, counterintelligence agents, Mafiosos, and general threats to his nation's sovereignty and security and the wellbeing of children everywhere, shrugged and resumed staring at his wife's bust because he was absolutely entitled to do that now.
"That's close enough."