Nightfall stood to the back of the sidewalk by the bus stop, as yet another bus trundled past without stopping. There wasn't quite enough water on the road for it to splash up at her as it passed, but it made a spirited attempt.
These were the awkward, indecisive hours of the morning. Too late for garbage trucks and construction equipment to still be on the road, too early for the cars of commuters with decent jobs, and so the streets of Berlint nervously occupied themselves with buses and delivery vehicles while waiting for the rest of the day to roll in. Even the weather couldn't make up its mind properly, trying to split the difference between rain and sunshine and winding up with modestly-lit dampness.
These were the sorts of thoughts Nightfall used to occupy herself while she waited for a bus to come take her away from this neighborhood for good.
The mission would have no trouble continuing without her, she reminded herself, once her thoughts started to recoil from buses and weather. There would be some problems posed by how "Fiona Forger'' had already made some public appearances, but they were nothing that WISE wouldn't be able to work around. In the short term, Fiona would just go to visit her family in the country again, to take care of her sick mother like last time, the poor thing. In the long term the role could be taken up by another agent. They would obviously have to select based on skill set this time, but any woman of her rough height and build would do. If she looked radically different they could rely on disguises, but if she looked anywhere close to Nightfall they might be able to just change her haircut and give her colored contacts. Fiona hadn't known anybody well enough for them to reliably recognize anything but the window dressing.
The important part was that whoever it was, it wouldn't be Nightfall. She wasn't good enough, no matter what the pit in the bottom of her stomach said.
Right. That was her mind drifting down inefficient paths again, she had no right to lose focus like that. She narrowed her eyes, emptied her thoughts and concentrated only on the sounds around her. This hiss of traffic in the distance. A dog barking somewhere. A truck rolling down the next street over. Delivery truck, by the sound of it. Come to think of it, Twilight had ordered some supplies the other day, hadn't he?
Nightfall scowled, and screwed her eyes shut completely. Back to the sounds. A door slamming in an alley. A horn honking. A bus turning the corner. The voice of a little girl, shouting "Mama!"
Nightfall snapped up her head and opened her eyes wide. Anya locked eyes with her across the road and began waving her arms frantically, as if she was afraid she might look away. With a panicked expression on her face she hopped off the sidewalk and began running towards her, directly across the path of the oncoming bus.
The next few seconds were a frantic blur where Nightfall couldn't remember making a single conscious decision. She felt her feet move, heard the oncoming rush of the bus and the too-late screech of its brakes. Her arms moved on their own as they picked up something small but weighty, and she felt pain shoot through her shoulder as she rolled out of a dive.
When her brain caught up with her, Nightfall was lying face-up by the curb on the opposite side of the street. She was cradling Anya, who looked surprised and shaken but unharmed.
"What were you thinking?!" Nightfall snapped, holding Anya to her chest as she gingerly got back up to her feet. With her free hand she began probing Anya's head, checking for any bumps she might have caught in the fall. "What have we told you about trying to cross the street? And why are you outside of the house alone?!"
Anya shivered slightly, letting her head roll with Nightfall's inquisitive strokes. "Mama, I'm wearing the dress."
"What?"
The bus door flapped open with a hiss and the driver sprinted out, white in the face. He ran briskly but unsteadily over to them, as if he didn't quite believe that they were safe on the sidewalk instead of under his tires right now.
"Are you two alright?" he said, squeakily, tones of panic in his voice mixing with relief in a strange emotional slurry. "I'm so sorry, I hit the brakes as soon as I saw her move, I'm just glad you were there, I don't know what I would have done-"
"I'm fine, thank you," Nightfall said, doing her best to be soothing. She didn't have a lot of experience with soothing. "Anya, are you hurt anywhere?"
"No thank you."
The bus driver breathed a sigh of relief that was more of a vomit of air. "Are you sure? It's not on my route but I could take you to the hospital, or I could drive you to a phone so you could call-"
"My daughter and I are both fine. Thank you very much," Nightfall said firmly. Firm, she had a handle on. "Please don't delay your schedule on our account."
"Okay, then. Just as long as you're alright." the bus driver said. He took another deep breath, pulling himself together with apparently herculean effort. "Again, I'm very sorry. To you and your daughter, miss."
"Bye, thank you," Anya said, waving. Nightfall followed her gaze and realized that she wasn't looking at the driver, but at the windows crammed with passengers trying to get a good look at the woman who had dived in front of a bus. Slightly unnerved, she began waving along with Anya as the bus pulled away.
When they were alone on the sidewalk, Nightfall set Anya back on the ground, then knelt down to address her at eye level.
"Now then. What do you think you're doing outside the house?"
"You woke me up when you left," Anya said. "And you were going to leave forever. And you didn't want to talk to Papa, so I came to find you myself."
Nightfall sighed. This was another complication she didn't want. Anya had issues with adoptive parents leaving her, didn't she? Maybe the agent replacing her would have to go heavy on the makeup after all. And old habits were dying hard for her, too, she realized. She had told the bus driver she was Anya's mother without prompting.
Nightfall looked Anya straight in the eye, and tried her hand at a soothing voice again.
"Anya, I'm not going to go away forever," she said, smoothly and chipperly. "I'm just going to go visit my own parents, and I should be back-"
"Don't lie!"
Nightfall broke off at Anya's exclamation. She realized that Anya hadn't stopped shivering yet, even though the morning was rather warm. She clenched two tiny shaking fists and returned Nightfall's gaze straight and narrow despite her trembling shoulders.
"You're going to leave forever because you think you're bad at being a Mama. And it's not fair, because I tried hard, so you have to try hard too."
Nightfall opened her mouth to protest, but the words failed to appear. A failure was progressing across her language center as training collided violently with emotion and instinct. There were ways to respond to somebody who managed to directly call you out on a lie, but the best ones all relied on backup plans, cover stories within cover stories to draw the target into a false sense of security. Nightfall hadn't managed to prepare anything like that for Anya. What cover story was she supposed to use on a scared and confused six-year-old?
Anya tugged on the front of her own dress, trying to draw Nightfall's attention.
"Mama, I'm wearing the dress, see?" Anya said. With a flash of understanding, Nightfall finally recognized the dress she had modified for Anya, those days ago when everything had made much more sense. The dress she had crammed all those safety features into, only to see it dismissed as "too scary".
"The dress isn't too scary," Anya said. "It was scary, but I tried hard and now I'm wearing it and I'm not scared at all. Just like I tried hard to study last night. And I'm gonna keep trying hard when I'm at school, and then again when I'm back at home. So you have to keep trying too, otherwise it's not fair."
A few ideas at denials had belatedly filed into Nightfall's mental queue. She paused, and waved them away. There was no point to them now.
"It's not about fairness, Anya," she said. "It's not about trying hard, either. There are... skills I don't have. It isn't right for me to stay "
"But you still want to stay, right? Don't lie."
What did Nightfall want, exactly? That was a good question.
Nightfall wanted Twilight to recognize her. To accomplish that, she wanted the mission to succeed. But to accomplish that, she had wanted Anya to be a perfect student, and that's where it all had gone wrong. She had spent this whole mission trying to rebuild it around her wants, and trying to force them had only wound up breaking things, And it was only when that thought crossed her mind that she realized the question she should have been asking from the start.
"Anya," she said gently. "What do you want?"
"I want my Mama and Papa," Anya said softly.
She stepped forward and wrapped both her arms around Nightfall's neck. Nightfall remained kneeling, petrified. She knew a dozen ways to throw off an attacker from even the most advantageous hold, but this little girl with her noodle arms had completely pinned her down.
"I tried really hard, so you have to try really hard too," Anya said to Nightfall's shoulder. "We'll work together. I'll be the best student, and you'll be the best Mama."
Nightfall looked into Anya's shoulder in turn. "You don't have to be the best, Anya."
"Then you don't either. So stay."
It was an absurd suggestion. Nightfall knew she had failed, knew that any third party at the agency would agree that her skills were wholly unsuited for the assignment. Background, bearing, temperament, all incompatible. She was about as effective in a mother's shoes as she would be on the surface of the sun. And she was supposed to deny all of this just because a child wanted her to stay?
Carefully, deliberately, like she was terrified of breaking something, Nightfall wrapped both of her arms around Anya.
"All right," she said. "I'll stay."
They stayed like that for a minute. Nightfall didn't give or receive a lot of hugs, so she wasn't sure how long one should go on for or how it was supposed to stop. But she decided to call it off when she felt Anya's stomach rumble. She stood up and took her by the hand, which felt weightier than it had before.
"Come on. You probably haven't even had your breakfast yet. Let's go home," she said.
They walked hand-in-hand back to their apartment, damp footsteps echoing down the empty street. It was only a block away from the bus stop, which raised the question of why Anya had taken so long to find her.
Nightfall looked down at Anya's hand in hers, and cleared her throat. "Anya. We're not going to do any studying today. Probably not for a while. We're going to have to work together to find a way that works for you. I treated you very badly last night, and I'm sorry."
"It's okay, Mama."
"We will, however, have a long talk about looking both ways before you cross the street."
Anya plodded in silence for a moment. "How long?"
"Significantly shorter than eight hours."
"Oh. Okay, then."
Studying habits. If Nightfall was going to make another attempt at this, that was a mountain they had to climb eventually, but it could wait until she knew Anya better, had a firmer idea of how she learned. It would delay the mission, probably. But Twilight would understand, and WISE had long ago learned that if Twilight couldn't meet a deadline then the deadline was clearly just wrong.
No, Twilight would understand. But would he forgive her? It was hard to say after last night. Twilight had a clear soft spot when it came to Anya, and hurting her had clearly hurt him. He would still work with her, certainly, but all her fantasies of becoming his wife seemed dead now. Maybe she could explain, tell him how she realized how wrong she had been to not think of Anya's feelings. But it was hard to be honest with Twilight. If she tried to be honest with Twilight about one thing, she just knew that other things would just come out with it.
Nightfall desperately wanted to be honest with Twilight. But today was not the day for it. Eventually, she hoped, she could tell him how she really felt. But not for a long time, and it was going to take a lot of practice.
A thought wandered in, lost, desperately late from her earlier search for responses to Anya calling her out on her lie. But after a moment's consideration, she decided it was still a good one. She still had to make things up to Anya, and if she was going to be honest at some point, there was an easy way for it to start here.
Nightfall held Anya's hand a bit more tightly to pull her to a stop. She knelt down once again, brushed her bangs out of her right eye to get a better look at Anya, and gripped her shoulders firmly.
"Anya," Nightfall said. "Your mama is a spy."
It was a huge revelation for such a young child to take in, obviously. Anya just held a blank expression on her face for a few seconds, like she didn't even realize she had just been told a secret, before a wave of emotions crested her face and she opened her eyes and mouth in extreme shock.
"I had no idea whatsoever!" Anya said, eyes the size of dinner plates, visibly strained at keeping them open so wide.
"Yes, I know," Nightfall said. "I did my best to hide this from you. But your mama works for people who want to make this world a safe place for little boys and girls, and that means we have to keep secrets from the bad guys. So sometimes I might ask you to do things you don't understand, and I might not be able to explain myself as well as you would like. There are some things even I don't understand. But remember that no matter what we say or do, your father and I only want what's best for you."
A stampede of panicked thoughts ran loose across her brain as she uttered the last sentence, because one detail hadn't occurred to her until just now. Oh please oh no please don't ask if Twilight is a spy too I can't answer that I don't want to betray his trust but I also don't want to lie to you right now please ask something else please tell me you want to go buy peanuts or something just please please please don't ask if-
"I completely understand and I don't have any other questions!" Anya said, a bit loudly but very decisively. Nightfall let herself breathe again as the stampede returned to its paddock.
"Good," Nightfall said. "Just remember not to tell anyone, okay?"
"Mama has a secret identity, like Bondman has sometimes," Anya said agreeably.
Nightfall nodded. At least there was a good excuse available in case Anya forgot about the "don't tell anyone" part. She patted Anya on top of the head, because that vaguely seemed like something a mother should do.
"Now, let's get back home before-"
"Wait," Anya said in a suddenly manic tone. She had frozen stiff except for her fists, which were now pumping up and down wildly. Maybe the shock of finding out her adoptive mother was a spy had finally caught up with her.
"Instead of books, can you teach me how to do spy stuff?!" Anya said excitedly. "I want to learn how to do the thing where you looked at that guy who stole the purse and knew his papa was mad at him!"
Nightfall looked into Anya's radiant expression and debated saying no to it. She reviewed the skills she had developed in her time at WISE, and noted just how few of them would be suitable to teach to a small child. But then again, she had agreed to try harder. Somehow that silenced the internal debate almost immediately.
"Okay, but only the fun stuff," she said, getting back up to her feet. "And don't tell your father."
"Yay!"
They walked off back home, with Anya singing the theme song to Bondman at the top of her lungs in brazen defiance of the early morning.
Twilight brushed his teeth sullenly, staring at a pair of eyes in the mirror that looked substantially less baggy than they rightfully should. He had let himself sleep too long; all the stress from yesterday had gotten to him. Today wasn't going to be any better, either; that was obvious just from waking up and seeing Nightfall's unoccupied side of the bed. What was she up to now? He had hoped she had learned her lesson yesterday, but trying to analyze Nightfall's motives was like trying to guess the size of an iceberg while blindfolded and in the Caribbean.
He gargled, spat, rinsed, and walked back into the hallway, where he stopped. He had just heard a sound he certainly hadn't expected to hear this morning.
Twilight sidled into the living room like he was trying to avoid scaring a deer. There, standing over the coffee table next to an abandoned bowl of cereal, Anya was laughing with excitement while looking over something with Nightfall.
Nightfall spotted him first. "Oh, hello, Loid. I hope we didn't wake you."
"Papa!" Anya spun around, managing a full 540 degrees on her socks on the hardwood floor before she slowed to a stop facing him. "Mama's showing me how to play a new game!"
"Oh," Twilight said, trying to fit this into any of the possibilities he had imagined when he woke up this morning. He grasped at straws. "Is it a studying game?"
"No, it's fun!"
"Is it. Good, then," Twilight said. He looked over at Nightfall, who had abandoned her seat on the couch to sit cross-legged next to Anya. She smoothed down her hair with one hand, cleared her throat, and looked at him with her usual sphinx-like expression.
"Would you be willing to run to the grocery store later today, Loid? We're out of milk and eggs, and I'd like you to pick up some food coloring as well," she said. I'd like to formally apologize for what happened yesterday. My behavior was unprofessional, uncalled for, and jeopardized the mission.
"Sure, if you like. What are you making?" Twilight said. Apology accepted, for now. We'll talk about this later.
"I was planning to make Anya a cake to celebrate her getting into school. We never did properly celebrate."
Twilight settled into the kitchen to make himself some breakfast as Anya cheered and began a near-perpetual-motion spin on the shiny floors. Well, food bribery was a tried and trusted method for dealing with small children. But the game was a sign of initiative, he had to give Nightfall that. Hopefully she'd be able to learn from this experience.
He noticed the bottle of wine that Franky had given them still sitting on the counter. It would be a good idea to have Nightfall formally meet him for the mission, and Anya liked him too in a weird way. Maybe a celebration was in order.
"I'm heading out to get those groceries," Papa said. "Anya, what kind of flavor do you want for your cake?"
"I want peanuts and chocolate and strawberries and jelly and peanuts and cake."
"Sounds delicious," Papa said, pulling on his coat and opening the door. "Any last-minute requests, Fiona?"
"No, have a good time," Mama said, focused more on her stopwatch than Papa at the moment.
Anya heard the latch close, and felt Mama's attention fix entirely back on the game, but still didn't look up. Instead, she just kept running her eyes across the few dozen homemade, hand-inked cards strewn across the table, taking in the pictures, their positions, the ways they were facing, and any other details. She had to beat her previous score. It always seemed like, just when she got a handle on it, the timer went-
Ding.
"Time's up," Mama said, sweeping the sheet back over the cards. "So, Anya. How many bad guys were there?"
"Eight! And there were five Bondmen. More than enough to stop them," Anya said. In early iterations of the game it had taken one Bondman to beat one bad guy, but Mama had tweaked the numbers for her, as that was obviously ridiculous.
"Is it?" Mama said, peering at her owlishly. "Are you sure the bad guys didn't have any allies?"
"No!" Anya said confidently. "The dogs were all facing up, so they were good guy dogs, and there was a bomb next to one of the bad guys, but he was also facing away from a thief who was next to a Bondman, so the Bondman stole the bomb. But he can't use it, because bombs are for bad guys."
"That's all correct," Mama said. "But you made a rookie mistake here, agent Anya. You underestimated the humble octopus."
Mama unveiled the sheet with a dramatic flourish. Anya gasped. How had she missed such an obvious pitfall! There was an octopus card in the middle of the table, next to three of the Bondmen and nowhere near any of the bad guys! Darkness ruled the day yet again, and more importantly her score was ruined.
"Again," Anya demanded. Mama promptly swept the cards off the table and began shuffling them.
I'll have to laminate these at some point. Anya looked up from fiddling with the stopwatch. Mama's thoughts were sharp and clear now that Papa was gone.
Rapid analysis and memory training is useful in a lot of contexts. It's good that Anya enjoys it so much, Mama's thoughts went on. What other spy related skills would it be safe to teach her? Basic encryption and secret communications, definitely. The old invisible ink trick is always impressive if she wants to make friends at school. She might like disguises, too. There are lots of things you can do with consumer-grade makeup and household items. Persuasion and deception are interesting to some people, maybe not to a small child. Probably best not to teach that as a parent, either. Wiretapping... no, that would probably be a bridge too far. Maybe if she does really well on her midterms.
Anya watched as Mama finished shuffling the cards and spread them across the table haphazardly. "No peeking," she said, lifting up the sheet to obscure Anya's vision. She just grinned in response.
Oh boy.
Oh boy, this was going to be so much fun!