Archive of Our Own

When midnight struck, easing the sleeping town into the much awaited day of Christmas, their home was already quiet. Anya had long fallen asleep under Bond’s gentle care, despite her excitement and determination to catch Santa Claus.

It seemed WISE was also in the Christmas spirit – he woke up with a start, his entire body tense and alert, his sixth sense screaming at him that something was wrong.

The reason for it? A gift, left on the ledge of his window. Alarm rang in his mind as he unwrapped it – it seemed that his newest mission did not come from his usual handler, Sherwood, but from an unknown higher up – something that was made obvious by the absence of the usual, secure encrypting of the message, but also by the sickening nature of the orders he’d just received.

Black, bold letters printed onto a snow-white strip of paper, along with an envelope; he pushed the strip of paper away, refusing to read it again so soon even as dread quickly rose to his throat. There was a single picture inside, blurry and barely distinguishable in the ambient darkness of his room.

Barely.

It was Anya. He could have recognized her from anywhere.

There, in that picture, she seemed even younger than she was now – maybe two or three years old, at most? Had she even been old enough to talk, back then? – and was standing straight, mouth pinched and eyes wide in fear and discomfort. A strange sort of device in the shape of a helmet covered most of her head, to the point that he couldn’t spot even one strand of her vibrant pink hair. A single line accompanied the picture.

Subject 007.

Her title.

Her name.

He resisted the urge to crumple the photograph in his fist out of anger, and looked back to the strip of paper. A thirst for violence and retribution swelled in the hollow spaces between his ribs.

His mission was simple, and consisted of three steps.

1. Bring Subject 007 to the headquarters immediately.
2. Eliminate all traces of Operation Strix and destroy compromising elements.
3. Disappear.

He’d read those words a dozen times already, and still he found himself unable to accept what they meant.

He couldn’t care less that they’d asked him, Loid Forger, to die.

But they wanted him to take Anya away.

They wanted him to kill Yor, and most probably Bond as well.

Was it what it meant, to fight for peace, to sacrifice for a better future? Lock up a child, kill innocents, and tear away a family?

Was it what it meant, to fight for the Good Side?

Wasn’t it everything he was supposed to stand against?

God, he needed to tell Yor. To do something. He couldn’t just –

A knock on his door stopped the maddening flow of his thoughts, and his breath stuttered. He realized, albeit quite belatedly, that his limbs were shaking in fury.

“Come in,” he croaked out, his voice no louder than a rasp – it drowned quickly among the wild pounding of his heart. He crumbled the note in his fist, and attempted in vain to ignore the way the words seemed to burn directly against his palm.

He didn’t try to go for the gun under his pillow. He knew, from the familiar knock alone, that he was about to meet Yor’s eyes, that he was about to pretend to the best of his abilities like he wasn’t overwhelmed with the urge to scream and destroy, to bolt into his daughter’s room and protect her from all danger.

Just as expected, Yor padded in, as silent and graceful as ever.

She met his gaze shakily – her own was filled with white-hot, boiling anger, and sickened horror.

A strip of white paper clung from between her fingers.

No words came to his mind, nor to his tongue. The realization was weightless, and entered the very fibers of his being more smoothly than he could have ever hoped.

Now, he could breathe again – because he might not yet understand the how or when or why, but there were now two truths he was certain of.

1. He’d been blind, and very, very stupid.
2. His superiors, and hers, had just made a terrible, terrible mistake.

Still, he forced himself to push the word out of his mouth – he had to make sure.

“Anya?”

Something in Yor’s expression bristled at that very name.

“They called her subject,” she hissed, her tone laced with such deadly poison that a shiver ran down his spine before she’d even finished speaking. “They hurt her. They want her.”

That poison was called hatred, and she spoke it in its purest form; mercifully, it was not directed at him, and he found himself unable to muster the faintest trace of pity for the ones that would suffer the full brunt of her wrath.

He nodded.

Removed the gun from under his pillow, and placed it in plain sight on his nightstand, pretending not to see the way her eyes followed the movement in muted surprise.

Patted the bed invitingly, showing her the free spot next to him.

Then, slowly, painfully, he unclenched his fist, allowed the crumbled strip of paper to fall out of his palm, and pulled the envelope into plain view. Her gaze zeroed on it with the focus of a predator that had locked on to its next target.

“I think we have Christmas plans to discuss,” Yor suggested flatly – and the lack of intonation, if anything, was proof of just how lethally furious she was.

She went to sit next to him without any hesitation, close enough that he could feel the warmth radiating from her body, and pulled from the folds of her clothes two golden stilettos that she placed on the other nightstand.

“I think we do,” Loid agreed, pausing to retrieve a folder concealed under his mattress. He glared at WISE’s logo, printed in black, taunting ink onto the cover. “It appears someone’s been very naughty.”