Days with Loid and Anya were easy.
Not so the nights.
In those early days of her marriage, a bevy of nocturnal sounds set Yor's teeth grinding, her spine tingling as instincts screamed, shaking her awake time and time again.
During the day, Loid made everything simple. Accommodating. Training as a medical and psychotherapeutic specialist seemed to have endowed him with a keen sense of empathy, and Yor wondered whether his deference, consideration and all the myriad soft gestures, and softer touches, rare though they were, were the product of his training.
He could tiptoe around her and make it seem utterly natural.
But, of course, she wasn't.
Normal women, proper mothers and civil servants and wives, didn't slaughter people, however vile they and their crimes may have been, without suffering from the pangs of guilt or self-recrimination. Empathy for her targets had been seared out of her at a young age, or, perhaps, was eternally scoured away by the Garden's reassurances - the hissing promises that she wrapped around herself to mollify a stilted conscience.
She was doing the right thing.
As much of an aberration as The Thorn Princess was, Loid understood her, and that turned weekends and evenings after he had come home from work into something simplistic and wholesome: a family gathering together around a dinner table for a meal while Anya regaled them with stories about her day. Faint smile on his lips as he dolled out some refined Italian dish that Yor couldn't even name, let alone pronounce, or cut Anya's roast into small cubes because she was too young to use a knife, or simply sat back, sipping his coffee and listening, Loid radiated indulgence the way that a flower perfumed the air, or the sun warmed her cheeks.
And why not? That's what he did, after all. Indulged them.
It had been that way since Camilla's party when, having been convinced that she was some sort of escort – the implication not having been lost on Yor – Loid spoke with such keen insight and tender, earnest sincerity of sacrificial love, as if in awe of her purported vileness. Where others saw filth and refuse or a reclusive, socially awkward woman, he saw her.
Part of her, at least. The part that she could allow someone to care for, or, perhaps, the portion of herself that could be cared-for.
Dealing with Loid in those early days was like being flayed open and placed under a microscope, or watched in some panopticon, every motion judged, but not to be exploited. No. Instead the flesh he peeled away left something new and raw, tingling in a way that made her gasp and bite down on the inside of her cheek at the barest hint or suggestion of his touch.
Loid knew her.
And that was terrifying and comforting, the product of his training certainly.
But the nights were, in those early days, hell.
Tinny rattles of the pipe that led up into the bathroom sink, the valves and junctions hidden in the walls and lower levels of their apartment complex, always grated. Whenever a neighbour flushed their toilet, but only at night for some reason, the clatter of metal against half-rusted metal would ring out through the apartment, startling her awake as her hand groped for the stiletto that should have been strapped to her thigh.
The creak of the loose floorboard just outside the kitchen as Anya-san rose to use the sink to get a glass of water, or, later, Bond prowled to explore the house on one of his patrols from the living room, to Anya's room, to Loid's door, and back were the footfalls of an assassin sent by Westalis to slaughter her and, because of her, the false family she had cobbled together with Loid, a man open and innocent. The kind of man, and family, who deserved the new Berlint and Ostania she was creating by pruning away all those diseased branches, uprooting trees and bushes that would never bear fruit and tossing them into the fire.
How quickly she could be consumed.
Alien experiences in the day enlivened and inspired the most marvelous phantasmagorical daydreams of smiling blue eyes and a dark-haired child on her lap and a thousand possibilities that her life had left her unable to name, the very concepts vague and fuzzy around the edges – seen through a lens slathered in Vaseline.
But at night, every novelty was a threat.
Those first weeks' worth of nights were long, interrupted constantly as the Thorn Princess nearly shot out of bed at each unexpected creak or whine. Acclimatization was a slow process for someone so accustomed to living alone.
A woman could become used to almost anything, though, and gradually the expected sounds were integrated into her subconscious, marked out not as dangerous aberrations, but comforts – the sounds of life, breathed into her own. Part of a new routine, they were anything but because family always surprised.
Slight perturbations of the regular schedule of noises always caused her to start awake, as they do tonight.
Darkness greets her, save for the creeping shafts of light that waver along her floor and bed, a light breeze ruffling her curtains to allow a hint of the streetlights to penetrate into her room. Floorboards beyond her bedroom door shift to the rustle of a nightgown and low murmurs almost as quiet as the breath of the wind.
A small figure is rocking back and forth on the balls of her heels, just beyond the door, the process of realization taking only a single second as the data flitters in, is parsed out, and catalogued.
Anya needs her.
Viscous and sloppy like coagulating blood, just a paste, anxiety bursts in her chest, a slow and rolling sensation unlike the acute terror that overtook her when Anya disappeared only days before, when they found Bond and brought him into this comforting lie that they were telling each other.
Anya needs her.
She's swinging open the door in an instant, revealing her daughter. Anya stands there on shaky legs, her stuffed pink chimera clenched to her chest, its head nearly being squeezed off by a grip that Yor could almost praise. Gooey globs of snot trail under her nose, meeting tears that leak from the corner of her eyes, but there's no sign that the girl is surprised by Yor's having burst out of her bedroom. Behind her, as if he's boxing her in, Bond sits, the tufts of fur around his muzzle giving him a hangdog expression, of all things.
The pink plush toy drops to the floor. Like a child weeping after being stung by a bee – so fuzzy cute that the girl, not knowing any better after having run her fingers out to brush the felt-bee in one of her picture books a hundred times, reached out to pet it – Anya extends slender, trembling arms up towards Yor's chest in a plea.
Yor hadn't even heard her crying.
Her knees meet the ground, their motions synchronized as the little girl tosses herself forward, arms clinging on to Yor's neck in a strangely feeble gesture.
"Anya-san, what is it?" she asks tersely, her voice strangely hollow and dull in the benighted hallway. The little girl grinds her messy face into Yor's chest, snot and salt water soaking into the fabric of her nightgown.
"I-I had a bad dream," she whimpers.
There were only so many things from which a fake mother or real father could protect a child.
"There, there, Anya-san," she begins, stroking the girl's back even as it shudders with the strain of holding back sobs, a similar tension arching into Yor's tense shoulders. "It's going to be okay. Mama's here-" Thoughtlessly, that spills out, but it's too late to take back. What kind of mother is she? Not Anya's real one. "It was just a dream."
Immediately and violently, Anya's head shakes. "N-no. It... it was papa and- and he-"
Of course.
What nightmares would haunt a child who'd already lost her mother? Especially after the bomb scare and Loid's lengthy absence when Anya was abducted, nearly ripped away from her father forever. Of course the scars would linger. They always did, hash marks on a hidden road-map, or bristling signposts with no destination in mind.
"Oh, Anya-san," Yor coos, hefting the girl up off the floor and striding out into the hallway, Bond thankfully granting her passage, stretching out his legs and shoulders, back arching, as if in obeisance. A silly impression. "Your Papa's here and so am I. Let's go see him."
"But Papa's..." Anya swallows as if something is lodged in her throat. "Papa's tired."
Anya gets her heart from her father, surely. How blessed her mother must have been to know that the little girl would be cared for, left in such good and strong and gentle hands.
"Yes, but Loid-san loves you." Although Anya, her reddened eyes peeking out from just under Yor's chin, appears uncertain, there's nothing for it but to cart her off to Loid's room. Surely he won't mind the disruption, despite his irregular sleeping schedule and the exhaustion that radiates from him after the longer days. Anya is worth that. "That's more important because you're more important."
Out of deference, knowing how deep that ache of adult-childhood fears reaches, Yor waits before knocking on Loid's door, cradling Anya to her chest. The floorboards screak under her feet as she sways back and forth, rocking the girl, soft and light in her arms; alongside the clatter of pipes and the solemn groan of the building as it settles in the night, her voice rings out, humming the snippet of a tune, just a few bars vaguely remembered and set on repeat like a skipping, stuck record.
It seems enough.
"'kay," Anya finally mumbles.
While she's loath as Anya to disturb Loid, Yor has already resolved herself. Sliding her arm lower, under Anya's rear, so that she can keep the girl perched safely with only one hand, Yor raps her knuckles against the panelling of Loid's door.
"Come in."
His voice, thick and tense but clear, rings out immediately. Perhaps he was having difficulty sleeping. Maybe that's why he always seems so tired all the time. Insomnia. He takes on so much, has so many burdens that she, Yor realizes while pressing inside, only exacerbates, between Anya, his job, and her that it would be no wonder.
His mind and heart must be aflame with worries every night.
Moonlight mingled with the haze of streetlamps pours in through the window, casting bizarre hatched shadows along the floor. Loid is sitting up in bed, shoulders bulging as he pushes himself into a seated position.
The faraway look in his eyes, even as his gaze is locked on Anya, is typical of him. Even when he's focused, the poor man always seems as if he's carrying the whole universe's weight of sorrows and cares around with him.
"Are you alright?" he asks, sitting up. Only a greater concern for Anya prevents Yor from blushing like the school girl she never was when the covers fall away to unveil his tight button-down night shirt. The first two buttons under his collar are undone, exposing a shadowy expanse of flesh, the hint of a muscular curve, and she's struck now by just how intimate this is. As if they're a real family.
His Adam's apple bobs, eyes flicking back and forth between Anya's smudged face and Yor herself.
"Anya-san had a bad dream," Yor explains as she steps into the room, moving towards the bed.
"I see," Loid responds though it sounds as if he doesn't. Perhaps Anya hasn't really had too many nightmares in the past. He scratches at his chin, looking a little bit lost, eyes flicking about the room as if he's questing to find something. "And... what can I do to help?"
"Whenever Yuri had a bad dream, I let him sleep with me." With Anya still clinging lightly to her shirt, breathing unsteady but levelling out, her chest rising and falling against hers, Yor takes a seat on the edge of Loid's bed. This would be so salacious if Anya wasn't here, and the thought does flash through her mind while she gentles the girl's hands away from her shoulders. Working in tandem with her, Loid has already begun to brush aside the sheets.
"Would... you like that, Anya?" he asks, though his eyes are fixed on hers. While they may not be, and will never be, a real husband and wife, there's enough of a connection between them, or enough latent animal instinct, to allow her to understand the question. She nods as the girl's limbs unwind inch by inch so that she can be transferred over to her father's arms, the hand-off completely smooth.
"Mmm," comes the girl's sighed reply as she snuggles in, the sight an indulgence that Yor cannot help but savour for a few moments longer than is proper.
This is worth killing for. Bloodying her hands.
Sending herself to hell.
If just a single man like Loid, and a child like Anya, can live like this, submersion in hellfire is a small price to pay.
She's about to leave, rising up from the bed and taking her first step from the room after asking Loid, through their nascent, tenuous connection, whether it's okay, when Anya, face in her father's chest, speaks.
"Shtay."
The slurred plea stops her cold, nearly causing her to trip right over the even floorboards as she whirls on the bed where Loid is holding the lightly squirming girl to his chest. The palm of his hand is so broad that it nearly envelops her entire back,
There isn't even time for Yor to ask before Loid is nodding, though his smile is taut, less confirmation and more echoed request.
As if Yor could have refused either of them alone.
Tentatively, she smooths out the under-sheet, making certain that it's tucked comfortably under Anya's chin with enough loose fabric for her to squirm and shift during the night. Then, she slides in under the comforter, just to maintain some level of propriety. A thin layer of fabric and their little girl – yes their little girl – are the only things separating them, and that thought has blood and adrenaline coursing through her head, her body tingling worse than it does in the moments before the Thorn Princess storms a barricaded stateroom.
"Mama?" Anya asks. Her voice would be sleepy and far away even if it wasn't muffled by her father's chest. Loid is staring at her, eyes locked and gleaming.
"Yes, Anya-san?" Yor responds, her hand falling on Loid's robust bicep and clenching, not that he seems to notice.
"Keep papa safe?" comes the child's whisper, slurred to the point that Yor can barely make it out.
"Of course." Though the girl can't see her, Yor smiles as if to reassure her, fingers trailing the groove of flesh in the interstitial space just in front of Loid's triceps. The rise and fall of his chest has stopped, and in the darkness, his eyes are so blue that they're nearly black pits in seas of white.
"You just go to sleep, Anya-san." Yor presses a kiss to the back of the girl's head, provoking a sigh from father and daughter alike. "Your papa is completely safe."
Already pillowed down in slumber, having drifted off, Anya doesn't respond.
But as Loid begins to breathe again, she sees, or thinks that she sees, him mouth out, "Thank you."
Gratitude has never tasted sweeter.
It's a flavour she grows used to, Anya's nightmares regular occurrences, as are nights spent with her father, Yor, and, occasionally, both of them. Those visits fade over time. Most scars do.
There are, of course, bitter tastes to balance the more pleasurable ones in life. Assassination missions increase in frequency in the coming weeks. Corrupt government officials are like weeds. In backroom deals, they leverage the political turmoil and uncertainty surrounding the recent terrorist bombings and fears regarding Westalian involvement, disinformation campaigns, and clandestine operations, to shore up their positions, or conquer new territory.
Games of politics, cloak-and-dagger affairs, are opaque to Yor; she shreds through puppet-masters' strings not with surgical precision, but brute force. Ostanian politics and society have always seemed to balance between those two incompatible impulses. Industriousness, cold and mechanical and cruel, married to artistic achievements that outstrip those of any other nation. Factories belch acrid smoke that soaks into the adjacent art-houses.
Elegant savagery is the Thorn Princess.
It's on one of these missions to a hotel turned charnel house, a killing floor, that she comes up short. Blood drips from her stilettos in the silence while the gunpowder smoke still swirls and wafts upwards, and she can't breathe.
She doesn't kill people.
She prunes.
Already dead branches litter the ground around her.
Keep papa safe...
She hears a child's voice, crying out in the darkness of a bedroom, and no one comes. Wails batter her eardrums, the rush of blood from her pounding heart joining the duet. One corpse had toppled over onto an ornate chaise. Its back displays a gaudy stitchwork scene of a woman in an elegant blue dress, bending at the waist to pluck flowers. A bouquet is clutched daintily in her other hand.
The man himself lays there, death-blind eyes turned away. Arms hang limp, the angles all wrong, tossed about in his death throes. Blood dribbles from the slit throat, each plick and splash echoing as the droplets join the pool, its edges already crusty, having soaked into the carpet.
So much blood this time.
Arterial spray from another guard has painted up his cheek and now pinkish hair, the colour fading into spun yellow, flaxen.
The Thorn Princess scrabbles for purchase on rain-slicked, mossy rock, slime sinking into her fingertips. Nails snap and tear out as she clings on in futile hope that she can keep herself from falling. Something like vomit is trying to force its way out of Yor's throat, but what emerges is a half sob as she looks out at the sea of bodies, the tide of blood.
All those bodies.
Even for her, it's amazing how heavy the weight of a dead body feels, each corpse bridal carried or heaved over her shoulder before being dismembered and then dissolved away. While she's never been much of a chef, whatever Loid and Anya have to say about her improvements over their months together, she knows how to clean, and usually scouring away the remnants of mission imposes a certain order on things. What things, she's not sure. It's easy enough to fall into the rhythm.
She hacks them up and mops the blood, disinfecting the room and leaving behind her only the unnatural antiseptic smell that burns her nostrils like gunpowder smoke. As she works, the image stabs into her brain like her own stilettos.
It's there. It's so deep, deeper than thought, than feeling, than sensation, and it won't let go, only wavering like a mirage when another sob bursts out.
Fingers around her mop and brushes and scouring pads twitch and tremble, her lungs filling up as if with fluid puss and blood, or an algal bloom. Lungs are crushed, her heartbeat slowing like she's going into a torpor. How easy it is for her to just sleep. Not be. Like someone who's already dead, hands flailing, body twitching in its death throes as it comes to that slow, irrevocable realization that it's no longer a person, she's trying to pry out the dagger, but limbs don't obey. Blood-stained hands, gnarled with rigor mortis yet still clawing bloody gashes into her throat, cling on and can't let go.
Blood on blonde.
Strawberry streaks like jam on Anya-san's morning toast, alongside the crunchy peanut butter. Bone flecks and flesh chunks.
She hacks up the body.
Reeking of blood, she staggers home. No amount of emergency perfume is enough to cover it, and that's all that she wants to do. Hide it away, or better still get the slime off her skin. Out from under her skin. But it's a viscous, churning thing, as if at any moment it will bubble up like boiling ointment on her palms, in her cheeks. Pustules from a deep wound ballooning up and rupturing flesh.
She has to get home, and does, nearly barreling into the door and cracking its hinges. The thought of waking Anya has her tiptoeing from that point on, ridiculous as it is, but her heart is in her head, throbbing. It so often is.
In the darkness, Bond waits just to the side of the entryway, like a soldier on guard, ready to review her papers to see if she's fit to pass. Apparently she is, because he merely looses a rumbling woof.
Her first thought is to go to the shower.
Her first desire is to collapse into bed.
Her first need has her opening the door to Loid's bedroom.
Already awake, he's breathing loud and lovely. Air whooshes from his lungs and the gentle rhythm of it leaves her nearly deliriously happy. What a gift, more than enough to make up for every Christmas and birthday that he'd missed in the years before she'd actually had a life. Shivers race from the base of her spine, erratic tingles like the brush of fingers against hypersensitive skin along her back. Perhaps the chill in the air comes from his open window, a breeze fluttering the curtains that she can hear but cannot see. Like radiance from a gauzy directed lantern, a thin shaft of pale light cuts a scar across the room, bisecting the edge of his bed so that only the impression of his feet is visible.
Eyes in the dark, she knows them, feeling but not actually seeing them, just as she did on the first day they met and her unflappable husband stuttered that she was pretty.
She still smells of blood.
At least she thinks that she does.
But who can tell?
Who indeed.
Finally, after what feels like the lifetime they've already spent together despite only having been fake-married for a few months because it has been a life's worth of joys undrempt, she speaks.
"I..." Just the word alone sounds like it's hanging from gossamer threads. Blood is in her nose again because her fingernails have pierced her palms, grinding in and the flow oozing out under her long nails.
There is no pain. Only pressure.
So much pressure.
"I had a bad dream."
There's a beat of silence that leaves her feeling immediately awkward, like a naughty child who broke into her father's study when he was trying to work, invaded a sacred space meant for serious work, replete with bookshelves and filing cabinets overstuffed with medical journals and adult novels and procedural documents that she's far too young to understand or read.
Then a shift of weight, Loid's arm tossing aside the heavy comforter. A naked chest and open arm gleam alabaster white in the ambient haze from the distant kitchen light.
She climbs in, and the blanket and his arm fall. Bulging, refined muscle is hard and hot against her side as she settles against his throat and breathes. Really breaths, perhaps for the first time.
The first time this hour? Tonight? How long has it been since she surfaced to breathe?
Cinnamon oil from his aftershave mingles with spice and sweat, the sheets soaked with it, enough for her to forget that she can smell the blood.
In ways that she cannot understand, the way that he holds her is hard and rough and soft all at once, and her breath hitches at the way his massive palm splays out against her lower back, running circles under her loose shirt, just above the edge of her underwear.
Gravely, deep, and sure as his chin rests atop the crown of her head, his voice soothes her, as does the gentle motion of his jaw and the slow and easy rise and fall of his chest against her burning, wet cheek.
When did she start crying?
Before or after she started to breathe?
"It's going to be okay," he assures her, and just like Anya, she believes. "It was just a dream, and I'll keep you safe."
Loid's not like her, or the Thorn Princess, who could savage a room full of trained guards and emerge unscathed. His gentle hands cradle her with infinite indulgence, Loid believing her to be fragile. He's never been sullied with blood, however righteous her cause. Never taken a life.
He can't keep her safe.
As his chin grinds against her scalp and his lips feather into her hair without any sign that he can taste or smell the blood, she sinks into him. Bedraggled hair is soft and luscious under her fingertips as she cards a hand along the side of his head.
Heated, moist cheeks brought down to his chest, she breathes and every sense is flooded with him, nose stuffed up with cologne and musky odour of skin; nothing but darkness in her eyes, crushed against his pectorals; no sounds but his breathing, and heartbeat, and the steady murmur of his voice, intoning nonsense.
"I'll keep you safe."
As they lay together, again the promise rings out, his voice unsteady, questioning as if he's groping for the right thing to say, while the arms around her waist tighten.
Even if it is just another lie they're telling each other, she actually believes he can.