My Home, My Family, My Duty, My Doom (Spy X Family) (MATURE!!)

It's the End

It occasionally happened that spies made jokes about "the end of their careers" - though not often, spies seldom got a chance to gather and to exchange pleasantries, they were decidedly solitary creatures after all. However, as he walked down the broad white stairs to the Desmond's gravelly driveway, Loid Forger suddenly recalled making a stupid remark about it once, more than six years ago, after a briefing at the WISE headquarters in Westalis.

Now that he remembered, it came to him with unusual clarity: The briefing had been for five operatives, including him, who were about to be placed in high risk environments. It was a rainy day, interlaced with patches of sun breaking through the billowing clouds, wet streaks from dripping umbrellas and raincoats turning the linoleum into a slippery menace. The briefing was held on the seventh floor, in the spacious room with the large windows facing West. It was one he particularly liked because of the view it afforded over the gently curving river and the elegant new footbridge that shone so brightly even on a gloomy day. It filled him with pride that his life in the shadows ensured the carefree, normal lives of the ant-sized people hurrying from one river bank to the other.

Peace was such a precarious, brittle thing. If the people in Westalis' Capital were able to forget that, Twilight and his colleagues were doing their jobs right.

That afternoon, four weathered operatives had taken them through a variety of threat scenarios, drilling them on the corresponding emergency protocols, which included instructions about how to end one's own life before the enemy could extract classified information that would jeopardize other operations and operatives. Apart from a few details, nothing about it was particularly surprising: their basic training already included standard operating procedures for all kinds of precarious situations. And yet, the message was clear: the antes were upped. It was getting real.

"I will miss you," Midnight had winked at him with a small smile at the end of it, ever so briefly touching his hand as she walked the other way, hips swinging.

Earlier that day, she had roasted him close to tears during his latest psych evaluation. Despite their (unofficial) friendship, she never held back when she had to test him. Instead of begrudging her that, Loid admired her more for her strict, merciless professionalism. She was a role model, the best kind of spy he knew. The only blemish: She was paired with Moonshine for everything.

Maybe he was a little jealous. He would miss her too.

"Will you come visit me if I end my career?" He called after her, suppressing a fond chuckle deep in his chest. This was about the funniest thing he had ever said because "ending my career" was a euphemism for dying, but she had just been put in charge of WISE's "cleaning operations" and would be the one to hunt him down should he ever go rogue.

Only that she had not found it funny at all.

"Don't you ever say that again!" The fury on her face when she jerked around to yell at him was such a surprise, he took an instinctive step backwards and bumped his hip on a door frame.

They had never talked about it. Back then, he had simply swallowed his discomfort over seeing her lose her composure and walked away. His hip had bruised a little but surviving life as Twilight was so demanding, he had no time to dwell over past occurrences.

Today, the memory formed a lump in his throat. This, right here - it was the end, one way or another. Until a few days ago, Twilight had never even considered that he would have to decide how to end his career. Why would he have: Twilight was who he was, there was no other identity beside it that wasn't fake. But now...?

Twilight was unmasked. Twilight had to disappear.

What would he become?

A black limousine with a gently humming engine pulled up below, gravel crunching underneath its tires. The driver alighted swiftly and opened the back door for them. It was the same person who had brought them here, a middle-aged man with a large mustache, fitting his black uniform just so.