Chapter Text
“I think I’ve fucked myself,” Moira’s voice broke the silence.
Angela had forgotten they were allowed to speak, and settled instead for leaning into her chair. She crossed her arms and turned her head sideways, as if considering the options from another angle would assist them in any way possible. It did not. She leaned forward and rubbed her eyes with the butt of her palms, grateful for the lack of visual stimuli.
“Well?” Moira urged.
“I’m thinking,” Angela pronounced carefully, lifting her head. She was not thinking, but saying she was bought her enough time to pretend to be.
It was all laid out on a board of plex, which had been Angela’s idea. Oftentimes doing so allowed her some clarity, but in this instance the action only materialized the issue into a more concrete enemy.
Moira was standing behind her, staring at the same large piece of glowing tech and plastic. “Shall we review the data?” She asked, despite knowing that was entirely unhelpful. This was pure theater, a method of venting her frustrations. Angela allowed the performance, even if it was mildly condescending. Moira retrieved a stylus, using the end of it to gesture as she spoke. “First blood transfusion,” the metal stylus made a satisfying click as it collided with the board, “lasted about twelve hours before the serum’s effects overtook the positive results. In conclusion: fucked.”
Moira tapped her lip with the stylus before continuing, as if there was anything to dissect from that definitive statement. “Second blood transfusion… even less effective. The third was a waste of resources, and I simply don’t know what we were thinking.”
“He needed it,” Angela interjected.
“He needs a lot of things,” Moira’s voice was flat and unwilling to indulge. She directed her attention back to the board. “The attempt to restore the maligned genetic material with healthy material was also, of course, fucked. He needs enough repair that we’d either be murdering an entire human male or require a pig farm to sustain him. Which is untenable.” Moira ceased her tirade momentarily, her brows drew closer together as she considered the board. “And of course my idea to clone him and create a bank of usable cells was shot down for ethical concerns,” she stated, finally, with thinly veiled annoyance.
“Yes, Moira, creating a human being to keep in cryo for the sole purpose of sapping resources from is, in fact, unethical.” Angela reiterated for at least the fourth time in the past two weeks.
Moira rolled her eyes at this, pulling her glasses from where they’d hung in her breast pocket and chewing idly at the arm. There was something in the action that Angela found attractive. Or annoying. She did not respond, as if the refusal of her methods did not dignify a reply.
“I don’t know, Moira,” Angela mumbled, turning to her desk and lifting her mostly drunk coffee to her mouth. It was bitter. She licked her lips, attempting to identify the taste. The drink coated her mouth unpleasantly. It took a moment to realize Moira was watching her with an expression of more than mild concern. “What?”
“That’s not from today,” she stated, pointing at the mug with her pen. “That wasn’t even yours.”
Looking down, Angela spotted the coagulated milk floating in the mostly empty mug and recoiled, dropping it on the desk and sliding it several inches back as if she needed to distance herself from the drink. “Ugh, God ,” her mouth watered and Angela spat what she could of the curdled milk into a wire trash bin. “We need to clean this fucking lab,” she swore, wiping the spittle from the corners of her mouth with the back of her sleeve.
Moira simply exhaled through her nose. She appeared to gather either her patience or her composure. In silence, she used the butt of the stylus to massage the bridge of her nose. Angela dropped her forehead to the cool metal desk in front of her and closed her eyes. The air settled between them. It was quiet for a few moments and Angela felt her thoughts begin to wander. The whirring of the hematology analyzer provided a soft hum of background noise. Somewhere to her right, a rabbit rattled in its cage. Her lab coat was both warm and uncomfortably snug around her shoulders. The table edge’s bite into her brow was a distant concern now.
The feeling of Moira’s hand on her arm woke Angela with a start. She lifted her head and looked around to find the traitorous coffee cup had been cleared away. The desk appeared more organized. “You need to get to bed,” Moira instructed, tapping her slender finger on Angela’s arm to rouse her completely.
Angela rubbed at the raw spot that had formed above her brows. She shook her head. “I would if I could sleep.” Anytime she lay in her bed, no matter how exhausted, sleep would not come. She could stew in anxiety for hours without managing a single moment of real rest. Eventually, she’d decided to pour that anxiety into the fruitless pit that had become this saving Reyes’ life.
Moira nodded, “alright then.”
Angela didn’t remember how she ended up in a park. At some point, she’d taken off her lab coat, been guided out of the Overwatch base and helped into a bus. Now, she was in a park and it was dark outside. Moira was beside her and drinking from a to-go coffee cup. The lake reflected the streetlamps in silvery lines, hypnotically dancing in place as the breeze toyed with the surface of the water.
“I don’t know what to do,” Angela stated, the sound of her own voice surprised her. It felt wrong in her mouth, and it felt out of place in the serenity of her environment.
“We weren’t getting anywhere sitting in the lab,” Moira explained, which answered nothing but was helpful nevertheless. “There are only so many times you can beat your head against a wall before you realize: all you’re doing is concussing yourself.”
Angela made a small sound in the back of her throat, neither agreeing nor arguing. “Do you wonder what Reyes told Ana about his medical records? What explanation he used for refusing to hand them over?”
Moira shook her head, “No, I don’t. As long as she doesn’t come back to you for them, then it isn’t our concern.”
“Our concern?” Angela asked, taking a deep breath of the warm, humid air. “I wasn’t sure if there was still an ‘us’.” Looking at Moira through the corner of her eye, she observed as the woman scanned the water.
“We should sit,” Moira decided abruptly, turning to the nearest bench.
Angela lowered herself onto it without protestation. A breeze rustled by them, pulling loose strands of blonde hair into her face. “I didn’t forget what I asked,” Angela pointed out, deciding to be stubborn as she tucked the offending hair behind her ear.
“Neither did I,” Moira responded. “I was thinking.” She ran her fingers over the brim of the now-empty to-go-cup. Her brows drew together as if contemplation was difficult, as if she were wading through psychological deep water. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she decided to say, eventually. “Right now, Reyes is dying. I’ll probably be considered the one whose killed him if we don’t fix it... And I’m not prepared to ask you to visit me in prison.”
Angela’s back met the bench behind her. “At least you’re honest,” she replied. Though, part of her had wished Moira might say something more comforting, even if it was not true. But Angela could respect the woman’s willingness to face a bitter reality.
Angela leaned slightly into the taller woman, shoulders pressed together. They sat in silence. The world was larger here than in the lab. The air pressure was lower. It seemed as though Angela had been trapped on a long flight and just stepped out of the airport, into a part of the earth that felt and smelled unfamiliar. Moira was still watching the lake and the trees. Angela closed her eyes, listening to the sound of the few cars that wandered the streets at this hour.
The sun woke her. It did not wake Moira, whose head lulled to the side as she continued to sleep. Angela pulled her head from the taller woman’s shoulder, wiping a trail of drool from her mouth. It occurred to her just how desperately she needed to brush her teeth. Not to mention, it’d been an unacceptable amount of days since she’d washed her hair.
Looking around and checking her hand terminal for the time, Angela recognized that she’d not slept this many consecutive hours in at least two weeks. Angela wasn’t sure if she should be impressed or embarrassed by that. She resolved not to ruminate and instead to wake Moira by gently prodding the woman’s shoulder. It didn’t take much before she blinked awake, looking around as she attempted to gain her bearings.
The woman seemed stunned that they had managed to fall asleep on a park bench. Her head whipped around as if she could not grasp their surroundings. Surely, this was still a dream? The surprise turned to mortification when she checked her watch, muttering a very quiet, “we need to get back to the base.”
Angela nodded, “I-yes.” She decided, pushing herself up before pausing. The warm Summer sun blossomed a bud of mischief in her chest. “We… well, it is Sunday.” Angela said, her voice leading and conspiratorial, in the way a fisherman baited a lure in hopes of a bite.
“Reyes is dying,” Moira reiterated.
“Not imminently,” Angela pointed out. “And we’ve both just fallen asleep on a park bench. I think we need… well at the very least a shower and a meal.”
Moira crossed her arms, considering the idea, when something in her coffee cup caught her eye. She stilled and stared into the empty drink. After a moment of deliberation, Moira fished a 10 Franc note from the cup. Holding the folded bill between her pointer and middle finger, she stared at it was if she’d never beheld such an item before. Gingerly, she passed the note to Angela. “I believe someone may have thought we were um… in need.”
Peering at the note in her hand, Angela could not help the first laugh that bubbled up from her chest. It was a mild delirium that gripped her.
They collected themselves, pulling their sun-warmed bodies from the bench and beginning the journey to the bus stop. Moira deposited her cup in a trash can and stood under the stop’s awning. It was outfitted with clear glass screens, which displayed the bus routes and times in white illuminated charts. Another screen set to display a local news station, which played silently but was captioned in Swiss German. Moira watched the screen, her hands pushed into her pockets.
“What’s happened?” She asked, indicating an image of a crowded city street, and officers carrying weapons of a glowing stun variety.
Angela read what the reporter was saying, shrugging slightly to indicate she’d never seen this particular story before. “She’s saying there was a riot,” she translated. “...In Lucerne outside the city’s hospital last night. Something about Omnics.”
“I see,” Moira replied, her voice quiet. She seemed unsurprised.
A man joined them, sitting on the bench and looking up at the screen. His mouth pressed together in a thin line, hair receding well past his forehead, and Angela turned away as not to look like she was staring. He pulled a cigarette from his pocket, and attempted to light the object. Angela thought that was peculiar, Moira was one of the few people she’d met who still smoked old-fashioned cigarettes and not the electric variety. She listened as the man’s lighter sputtered out no flame.
“Do either of you have a lighter? Please?” He inquired, his voice both quiet and hoarse.
Angela shook her head, but relayed the question in English to Moira, who fished in her pockets and discovered nothing. “Sorry, no,” she replied.
The man waved it away, then looked at the screen again. “My wife was there,” he stated abruptly, gesturing with a finger towards the news broadcast. Apparently no one had died, if the headline was to believe, but some people were injured and in custody. At least one Omnic was decommissioned.
Angela didn’t expect the unprompted sharing of information, but years of cultivating her bedside manner smoothed out most rough social interactions. “That must have been stressful, I do hope she’s alright.”
Moira’s brow raised as she listened to the pair speak, unable to discern what was being said. Subtly, she pulled out her hand terminal, and in small text it translated the conversation silently. Angela would chastise her for eavesdropping if the discussion wasn’t being had directly beside her.
“She works in the hospital,” the man explained. “The Omnic that started it all was a coworker of hers.”
“I’m… not familiar with the situation,” Angela admitted. She inched a little closer to Moira. These sorts of conversations could turn uncomfortable quickly.
“I thought Overwatch personnel would be,” he commented in return.
There was a moment where both Angela and Moira glanced down at themselves, attempting to discern if they’d left their ID Badges somewhere visible. Neither of them had, apparently, and Angela looked up at the man with an expression she hoped conveyed her confusion. She studied his face, a man of middling age of average build, perhaps a little sallow around the eyes. He wore a button down and khaki pants, a pair of glasses tucked into his breast pocket. Angela decided he could be anyone.
The man reached into his back pocket and some part of Angela’s field training ignited, proposing a million scenarios where a firearm or a grenade or a taser was revealed. But in his outstretched hand was a piece of paper, a flyer of some sort. Moira stared at it, despite none of the text being in English.
There was an image, an old one, of a hospital after an air strike. Angela was uniquely familiar with the picture. The title, labeled in clean dark red lettering, “Overwatch Postergirl’s Parents Murdered by Omnics - Is Mercy the Answer?” Angela set her jaw, felt her lip curl and in an automatic motion, crumpled the flier. “That is sick,” she managed through her teeth. She opened her mouth again, prepared to continue a tirade when Moira’s hand squeezed her bicep. Her fingers tightened on the paper, but she turned to find the bus they’d been awaiting had appeared. With one last glance at the man, Moira pulled Angela into the vehicle, not willing to miss the bus, so the younger woman could give this stranger a piece of her mind.
They sat, and Moira allowed Angela the window seat. “What was that?” She asked.
The paper had been crumpled beyond repair, but she passed the balled-up parchment to Moira. It took some effort to straighten out, and she used her hand terminal to translate the text. There was more of it, small paragraphs of justified words beneath the image and headline. Moira exhaled and re-crumpled the paper. “Did you know these sorts of things were being printed?”
“Certainly not.” Angela shook her head before reconsidering her reply. “Well, a few fringe websites published some things when I was hired but… I didn’t realize these old articles were circulating again.”
“It’s not an article,” Moira pointed out. “It’s a flier, printed to be distributed.”
Propaganda, Angela thought, but didn’t say aloud.
A moment of silence stretched between them. Moira pocketed the paper. “When we were at the conference,” she began. “The reporter asked if Overwatch was concerned about growing Omnic resistance-”
“I didn’t answer that question,” Angela cut in, as if to defend herself.
Moira paused and lifted a hand to steady the other woman. “I know. Let me finish.”
Angela took a breath, feeling the tension in temple her grow as she clenched her jaw.
“The reporter asked that, after we had just been on a mission to an-” she looked around as if remembering their visit to the Omnium was confidential, “- a factory. And now we know Ana needs Reyes’ medical reports for a field mission.” Moira pulled at her knuckles, cracking them as she processed her own words. She was pushing an idea into the atmosphere. It hung there like a liquid in low gravity, a wobbling incongruent sphere hanging between the two scientists.
Angela sunk further into the bench of the bus seat. She looked outside the window at the city passing them by. The sun warmed the streets, casting the trees in vibrant greens. People stood at bus stops, sat at benches, and rode bicycles. Cars hovered above the streets, silently passing by. It was peaceful, she decided.
“There is a memorial for the hospital my parents had worked in down that street,” she said and pointed briefly as the bus glided past it.