Folding Laundry, Spy x Family mini fic
Decipher the intercepted report. Prepare intel for Handler. Pick up groceries. Loid ran through his seemingly endless list of tasks, calculating each step of execution and strategizing on the most efficient plan of action. But when he set the laundry to fold on the couch, Yor appeared with a smile.
“Let me help with that.”
It would take two minutes and thirty seconds to fold it himself, and he only had three minutes to spare on this mountain of clothes before he had to start on his patient files. But Yor was humming a tune as she started separating the clothes, and, after a moment, he sat down beside her and quietly started folding.
The afternoon sun streamed in, warm and fuzzy. Bond yawned disinterestedly at them and shuffled into Anya’s room. Sitting so close to Yor, Loid wondered again why she never seemed to wear perfume.
Focus. Like any operation, Operation Strix could collapse in an instant if he wasn’t vigilant. There was the slightest tension in Yor’s shoulders, a slight discomfort or unsureness, that he’d noticed before in these very quiet moments.
“Do you miss your life before this?” He asked, blunt in a way that only a moment like this could allow.
She looked up, surprised. Her eyes drifted to the window as she absently smoothed the creases in Anya’s frock. Loid found his next breath hinged on her answer.
“In an odd way, yes.”
He knew it. Operation Strix was in danger. He had to find out more, a way to fix this. He had to keep this fake family happy for the sake of world peace.
Yor continued on. “After my brother and I came to the city, I was by myself. I kept a small apartment. Just a bed, a kettle, a few clothes. I didn’t go out much, didn’t have friends really. Yuri would visit, of course, but he was busy with work.”
Loid tried to picture this life and found a familiar echoing pang. “That sounds lonely.”
Yor shrugged. “It was all I knew. Pain doesn’t feel like pain when it’s all you know. But this?” She looked around, noticing the room and him in the same way he’d done. “This is unfamiliar. And that’s harder.”
Her eyes widened, and red colored her cheeks. “Not to say that I don’t want this or- or I’m not grateful!” She rushed to explain. “This is arrangement has been the best thing to happen. It’s just…”
“New?” Loid supplied, though it wasn’t quite the right word.
She hurried through the folding, and a moment later, nervously asked, “Do you miss your life before this? I mean- I mean, before Anya and your first wife?”
Loid slowly buttoned the shirt he was folding. He remembered the brutal military camp he infiltrated to get close to an officer. The snooty soirée to seduce the minister’s daughter. The loud explosions of the battlefield.
“There wasn’t much of a life before,” he admitted.
She nodded gently, and the slight tension in her shoulders eased. And to Loid’s surprise, so in his. They folded the rest of the clothes, taking in the warm sun and noises from the street.
He gathered his clothes and she took the rest to hers and Anya’s rooms. Putting them away, he ran through his list of things to do again. He’d wasted too much time. He still had to prepare reports and patient files and get dinner. But the buzzing, stomach-turning anxiousness to get everything done had quieted, and that left him nervous and paranoid.
So when he heard a ruckus, he rushed to Anya’s room, grateful for something to snap him out of this calm.
Anya had gleefully seized Yor’s interruption to abandon homework and was playing spy with Bond and her toys.
“But Agent Anya, what about your homework mission?” Yor cried in her TV-spy voice.
“The mission is in trouble! Agent Anya needs hot coca to save the day!” Bond borfed. “And cookies!”
“Okay, if Agent Papa says it’s okay to take a break,” Yor said, turning to him standing in the doorway.
“Agent Papa!” Anya saluted. “Hot cocoa and cookies!”
Their eyes were shining bright in excitement. Bond wagged his tail. The house wasn’t just warm with the afternoon, but with the joy of this little fake family.
Loid remembered the cold of the military camp sinking deep beneath his clothes, leaving him freezing and sick. He remembered the bitter bile taste of choking back his words when highbrow ministers spewed hateful words. He could feel the splintery wood of the makeshift cot as he lay at night, waiting for bullets to rain down on them in the morning.
He put on his best impression of Handler for his waiting family, but he suddenly understood what Yor was talking about. All of his past lives were hard. Terrifying even.
But not as terrifying as this.
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