Work Text:
Don’t get attached.
It was the most basic rule to becoming a spy; it was good being able to spin a quick lie, to be able to hold that poker face through dire situations, but humans are supposed to become attached. From the earliest humans, attachments kept them alive; perhaps that was why Twilight was so effective, maybe he wasn’t human.
Don't fall in love
He’d always dismissed love, his fathers death, his mothers death, that warpath his friends fell victim to, love was a weakness. His fellow soldiers had mooned over pictures of their gals back home, exchanged saucy prints for rations and cigarettes, boasted of letters of adoration, the promise of returning for praise and kisses their drive. He had watched from his top bunk as they huddled whispering, he hadn't not felt love, but when love was scorched bodies pinned by rubble, dog tags at the bottom of a barrel, or a beautiful man who stares at you in disgust and asks if you're some kind of freak, it's easier to pretend that it never existed at all.
Don’t start to care
The only thing you should care about is your country, don’t care about the women whose hearts you'd broke, they would have been broken anyway if they'd found out you’d never really loved them. Don't care about the people you’d used, when sex was nothing but a weapon, a fling for information, he didn't need to pretend to care, only pretend that it didn't make him feel sick.
Don't reveal yourself
Before he started his espionage with so many fake names and personas, before joined the army with another mans life masqueraded as his own, before he left home that last time the shame of lying to his father, a blanket to patch over the writhing beast that he didn't yet understand, that he would come to understand with the men in the firing lines, the woman taken by the secret police, hushed whispers, and his learned silence.
Don’t get attached
It was a mistake, but he cared for this family he'd made, more than any he had before, the little girl who accepted him without pause, who sometimes looked up at him with no explanation and big damp eyes; his not-wife, who one evening took his hand and squeezed it, you’re like me aren’t you, was all she’d said and then went to bed. A safe space that never demanded answers, only desired companionship, he wasn’t sure he deserved it, this kindness the universe had gifted him, but was it wrong for him to take it and hold it close to his heart.
Maybe something like this was worth getting attached for.