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Angela was in trouble, that much was clear. This relatively normal mission had devolved into something chaotic, and if she had known it would end up like this she would have never told Winston she would participate. She’d be in her office, drinking coffee and overviewing cases, her ankle not broken.
“Mercy here, requesting assistance,” she tried the comm link again, and again received no response. Typical. If she made it out of this, she’d be put off from these sorts of missions for a while. A long while.
Her earpiece buzzed, and she immediately tensed in preparation. Finally. She heard explosions and empty air and then a strained, “I need healing.” It took Angela everything she had in her not to take it out, crush it, and somehow crawl to the train station. From Venice back to Zurich would be around six hours, so it was very tempting. She hoped that omnic could handle this on his own without her. He seemed perfectly capable and Genji liked him very much.
“I can’t leave,” she muttered to the alleyway. But I can’t stay here.
“But, oh, how fallen …”
It was a voice Angela knew well, very well. A voice she thought she wouldn’t have to hear again. She aimed in front of her, at the black smoke that dissipated to reveal Moira O’Deorain.
“Shoot me, if you feel you must.” Moira said, amused, “Perhaps not the best idea, considering the circumstances, but I suppose it would be apt enough.”
She was right. Angela lowered her weapon. If she wanted her dead, Moira wouldn’t have said anything. She was nothing if not efficient. There was no point in provoking her, at least not physically.
“You look awful,” She narrowed her eyes. It was the truth. Moira seemed paler, something Angela found amazing: there was a dull purplish tint not just to her right hand, where she had expected to see it, but to most of her face. It might have just been the equipment she carried, but she suspected it couldn’t be so mundane. Not with her. She looked older, too, but that made sense.
“Have you had the privilege of looking in a mirror lately?” playful, it was a tone she recognized and it sent chills up her spine. Could she really be...the same?
Angela didn’t dignify that with a response.
“Do you have anything better to do than break the law, Doctor?”
“That’s rich coming from you,” she couldn’t help herself, “Talon? Really?”
“Really.” She made no attempt to rationalize or explain it. Angela hadn’t expected it, because Moira had never done that before, but she imagined it in every fantasy she had about this exact conversation. She found it impossible that Moira did what she did without thinking about the wider implications of her actions, so she made up a rationalization for her. It’s no different than Blackwatch, this imaginary Moira would say, what I do now is actually more legal than what I did back then.
But she did have a rationalization, one that Angela utterly despised.
“Progress, ja?” She laughed, “Always progress.”
“Forward. Never back.” She said softly. When she had first told Angela this, back when they first became acquainted, it was enough to clean the initial bad taste in her mouth out. Never back . Never back to a place like the Omnic Crisis. She could believe in something like that at Overwatch, but now she had to believe in less dangerous things. Things that wouldn’t destroy the world, like the sanctity of life.
For someone so uninterested in moral binaries, Angela realized, Moira was awfully wound up in one. Progress good, past bad. Anything done in the name of it was good and right, anyone who disagreed was ignorant. And maybe she was, maybe through everything Moira could come up with the cure for cancer or unlock the power of the human genome. Maybe. Angela, despite the fact that she went around dressed like a literal angel, stopped believing things would work out when her life imploded all those years ago.
“I stopped believing in you a long time ago,”
“That means very little to me, Angela.”
“I know.” she frowned. Moira raised her eyebrows for a moment, then regained her calm, scholarly expression. Victory.
“So they’ve left you here…” she looked around the alley, suddenly caring about Angela’s condition.
“Apparently.”
“Your ankle?”
“Broken.” maybe she should have been more reticent, but she didn’t care. She was having this conversation, the one she had dreaded and hoped for in equal measure for years. And it wasn’t going as planned.
“...does your suit have a…” she pinched her forehead in thought, “regeneration function?”
“Not for broken bones. That’s item number one on my to-do list when I go home.”
“Ha. I should hope so, after this.” Moira grinned, voice oddly warm and not mocking.
The rush of memories brought on by her tone could not be held back, and she asked, “What do you want? Why are you talking to me?”
“I respect you deeply, Angela. Your involvement with this...resurgence worries me.” her voice became soft, confused, and she suspected Moira was more confused at herself for feeling this way than at Angela.
“You can’t talk me out of this. Not like this, when you associate with...frankly, I don’t want to know.”
“Benefactors are benefactors, Angela. We live in a time where the most extraordinary things are happening behind closed doors, away from the eyes of the law. It has always been like this.”
She narrowed her eyes, “You know you can’t convince me. You never could. Face it, you know that one day you’re going to have to choose between your ‘benefactors’, your progress, and the people you pretend to care about. Of which, I assume I am the last.”
“You think far too highly of yourself, dear. As usual.” anything remotely soft or warm left Moira’s voice. She had hit a nerve. Good.
“Then, why are you here? And why haven’t you finished me off yet?” Angela knew it was better not to provoke her, but death was not as permanent as she once thought, at least not for her. Dying to prove Moira wrong would be uncomfortable, maybe even a waste, but this was her current situation, and Angela would make the most of it however she could. Like this, she could get under her skin, poke at the doubt she knew lingered in the back of her mind. That, she also knew unequivocally, was how to hurt Moira the most--to pull stones from the foundations of her most tightly held convictions, so that her entire being would wobble. Uncertainty was torture for Moira O’Deorain.
She did not respond with words, she merely stared at Angela as if she were a worm of some kind. She raised her hands, stretched her long fingers, and sighed wearily.
Angela smiled maniacally and squeezed her eyes shut, preparing herself for the creeping ache that was to come, and then the nothingness. Then her ankle painlessly snapped back into place. She opened her eyes and saw Moira with one hand outstretched, her left hand.
“You have not won.” she said quietly, and just like that, she was gone.
She sat, catatonic for a minute or so, and slowly brought herself to her feet, testing her ankle and finding it fine.
“Doctor! Holy shit!” it was McCree standing in the opening of the alley, holding his hat on with one hand, “Have you been here the whole time?”
“I--”
“It don’t matter, come on, we’ve been looking for you for...I don’t know, it don’t matter. Just come on.”
Angela sighed. Her work was never done, even when she needed it to be most. There was a spectre at her back, dredging up memories of a time she had long forgotten, though apparently not as completely as she thought she had. It was the worst time to be needed. Moira had done her no favors.
“You alright? You look right spooked, Doctor.” McCree was always rather adept as seeing through people. It was probably a learned adaptation.
“It’s nothing.” she smiled, remembering her bedside manor, “I’ll be fine once I get back to work.”
“Right…”
“You were taught better than to press.” she warned, still smiling, “Believe me, some things are worth forgetting.”
McCree squinted at the buildings around them as they walked, “If there’s anything being back here makes me realize, it’s that.”
“A friend of mine once told me,” she shrugged, establishing a connection with her staff, “‘Forward, never back.’”
“People don’t work that way,”
“No. We don’t.” Angela conceded with a grimace as they approached the payload.
But she does.