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Yor finds herself mourning the life she’s never had at the most inconvenient moment.
It’s nothing horrific or earth-shattering: simply one that should cause her to smile and forget. She, Loid, and Anya are walking home from grocery shopping, sunshine warming their shoulders and a light breeze ruffling their hair. Anya clutches onto Loid’s hand, chattering about the latest Bondman episode. Loid smiles down at Anya, the usual wariness he has around her antics nowhere to be found. Yor watches them, her own smile full of real, true happiness. Funny that she’d found a piece of it here, where she’d assumed there was none to exist.
And yet, despite becoming a Forger to hide a lifetime filled with secrets and streaks of blood, she’s made all too aware of her shortcomings. Loid may be stern with Anya sometimes, but he’s a good parent. He may say he struggles, but Yor can see a different story in the way he nods and leans down to listen to his daughter. Yor had tried her best with Yuri, but had it been enough for this?
It had been hard enough trying to blend in at her City Hall job, yet trying to fill the role of wife and mother feels strangely vulnerable, as if exposing one of her most hidden scars.
Yor knows the war had scarred everyone who’d been caught in its wake. It doesn’t cause her own scars to hurt any less.
She wasn’t much older than Anya when she lost her familiar world. It was a summer like this when she’d first been recruited by Garden. Yor had dropped out of school by then, searching for temporary jobs to fill her and Yuri’s stomachs, maybe give them a roof for the night. Back then, the offer had felt euphoric. It was a way that she could finally provide for the person who meant everything to her, the remnant of what she’d lost.
Yor is aware that she is an oddity. She wasn’t a soldier, but she suffered and bled like one. She wasn’t a child, but was never considered an adult. She was forced to grow up in a world where she had to fight for everything that should have been hers, and while Yor knows she’d do everything the same in a heartbeat, she can’t help but wonder what could have been.
In a way, she still feels like that small, bloodstained girl from before, stuck in the strange place of being older than her years and navigating its weight. Who is she to step out into the world, to become more than what she’s destroyed and what’s destroyed her? Who is she to parent a child who has been untainted with the horrors she’s faced, to support an equally broken man despite the nature of their relationship?
And yet, something about the life she lives now—Loid’s and Anya’s smiles—convinces her to try. To shut down all of the voices in her head that chain her to her past, her circumstances, her work. She may not be the most experienced, or the most flawless, or even the most whole. But she can treasure the people she has now, and give her all in the things she stumbles through, and learn how to accept the harder parts of her world.
She finds that she learns more about herself through sacrifice, because it’s all she’s ever known. She realizes that for her there is no shame in it: how can there be nothing but strength in caring for another, laying yourself and your motives bare for their sake? Yes, she mourns the life she could never live, but she does not regret who she is now.
She does not regret how she’s lived and healed from her scars.
Yor looks back at her family and smiles.