#the woman who thinks herself alone & unknowable learns again and again thru to the end of her life how deeply she is cherished & understood

[beannoss]

Twilight headcanon

Inspired by this super lovely art by @roucaelum-art 😍! (brief mood spoiler: roucaelum's art is so soft and so sweet! This hc has a touch of the bittersweet 🫶)

After Strix, when the Forgers are well established, no secrets between them, Twilight starts journaling. Obviously this is a security risk, so he creates an elaborate cipher. He tests it on Franky. He tests it on the cipher-breakers at WISE. He even feeds some to the SSS. None break it. Satisfied, he starts to journal. Twilight's journaling time is something he starts to jealously protect; given how much it means to him and helps him process things, Yor starts to protect it jealously, too.

Later in life, when he and Yor have been together for decades, he teaches the cipher to her in case she wants to read and/or share his journals after he dies. It takes time, of course, but not as much as someone might otherwise think, knowing Yor and looking in from the outside. This is in large part because Twilight creates the cipher with Yor in mind. Rarely one to do something for a single purpose when multiple are available, creating it with the intention that Yor can easily learn it also works to confound others in his profession. You see, he’d never met anyone who thinks the way Yor does, and certainly it's far outside espionage or intelligence norms, a way in which no one in those professions would expect a cipher to operate. This revelation he saves for his final journal, and Yor only learns it had been intended specifically for her after his death.

To that point, Twilight does (peacefully) predecease Yor, but she finds she can’t share his journals with the outside world, not yet. They're too precious, too close, touch her too deeply, to share outside the family.

She teaches Anya the cipher, so their daughter can read and share his journals after Yor passes away.

Anya does: she reads her Papa’s journals. Spends a few months, a couple of years, keeping them between herself and her parents' memories. Twilight’s accounts, unsurprisingly, have incredible detail about Yor and Yor’s life and Yor’s opinions and Yor’s views and Yor’s daily life and the way Yor moved through the world. There’s an incredible amount of detail about Anya too: Twilight hadn’t started journaling until years after Strix ended, nearly a decade after he adopted Anya. But, of course, his memory was impeccable, and once he started writing, he never stopped.

Anya reads about herself, about her mother, about their loved ones and their enemies. She reads his words about politics and the news and Twilight's opinions on literature, film, various cuisines. The bakery down the street and the neighbour with the lush roses. Spycraft, war, and international relations. Parenthood, partnership, friendship. Every other idiosyncratic thing he chose to write about. All of it written in her father’s matter-of-fact style from his matter-of-fact perspective, which was always more full of love than he would admit or accept.

She grieves anew, softly, and in her own time.

One day, when she's ready, Anya goes to her father’s favourite archive. She asks to speak with the archivist team. She asks if they would like the journals of the greatest spy in Westalis history: had they ever come across the name Twilight in their research?

She teaches them how to decipher his code (it is, of course, the most complex and creative cipher the lead archivist has ever seen. Anya thinks of her mother, and smiles). It takes them time to go through everything; it takes them time to verify it. But of course, they do. Because Twilight was thorough and he was precise and and he was an excellent planner, prescient more often than not. He ensured there were enough careful points of reference that diligent researchers would be able to confirm his identity and the veracity of what he wrote. And he would only trust the most diligent of researchers.

It's a small archive; the launch of the display of Twilight's journals is similarly small. Anya thinks he would prefer that. The idea of hoards of people reading his words all at once, even if he had intended their being made public, might be enough to revive his stomach aches from beyond the grave.

Anya attends the opening with her loved ones, and later, at home, she shares her own memories of her Papa, and her Mama, and the times they saved the world.