turning tension's twisted coil (overwatch | mercy/moira)

[fiachairecht]

turning tension's twisted coil. overwatch, mercy/moira. post-Fall, if angela can't have moira then no one can. 679w, rated m. for the crossfaded ficathon.

Angela looks down at the woman strapped to her hospital bed and finds herself surprised at the amount of sadness managing to creep over her heart. She'd thought her capacity for tears exhausted years ago, when she buried her heart in a Zürich crater and lied to herself that she would never look back, but this—

Well. Moira O'Deorain was always good at dragging the unexpected from her, no matter how much Angela fought. And now she's here, Angela's to do with what she pleases, no matter that she'd never thought she'd see the woman or the ghosts under her skin again.

The syringes lie in a perfectly neat line on the brick and wood table. Moira is pretending she can't see them, reminding Angela almost against her will why she'd found the other woman so horrifically fascinating in the first place.

"Running away from the shadows to reappear as an Oasis minister isn't a good look, Moira." Her voice is brittle in the perpetual twilight behind her faded, ineffective blackout curtains.

"You would know from good looks." Moira's eyes are hazy through the drugs, though her tone is as acerbic as ever. "When was the last time you slept, Doctor Ziegler?"

The emphasis on her title is impossible to miss, but not even the reminder of their old battles makes Angela feel any better about what she has to do. She lifts the syringe, watches the hollow light sparkle against the liquid inside. Almost pretty, in a way Moira makes her forget science should be.

"You don't sleep much either, from what I recall. All those nights in the labs I wasn't supposed to know existed ... I don't think I would call anything you did then sleeping."

Moira grins, uncomfortably slowly like her muscles have to think a moment too long about how to perform the motion. The first puncture wound must be throbbing by now, even though the syringe hadn't left a mark. "No. I remember us finding better ways of passing the time in those labs."

"Better than what?" Angela raises an eyebrow. It's easier than she'd thought to pretend that the memory of Moira's mouth doesn't still burn between her thighs. "Oh, that's right. Better than you abandoning Overwatch when we most needed to understand what had just happened to us?"

Moira shifts in her restraints, doesn't protest the second shot. Angela kisses her as she pulls back, partly a reward and partly just to see what's changed. Moira's lips are still dry, stiffer than in the past — though, that's Angela's doing now.

"I'm Overwatch now, hm? I remember ... I remember you telling me that our organisations had ... nothing ... to do with each other."

Moira's eyes are drifting shut. Angela closes her own and remembers green, glittering green. "That was before we were all that was left." Overwatch and Blackwatch alike had shattered after Zürich. Leaderless, missionless, they'd drifted, left to themselves to pick up a new meaning wherever they landed.

Angela had always managed to find a meaning of some sort in Moira's bed, no matter how much she hated it — the bed, the meaning, the woman herself. Robbed of even that opportunity, with death draped over her shoulders like a cloak, she had resigned herself to being nothing more than tired as she returned to charity work.

Moira had changed everything when she resurfaced in the desert.

Is still changing them now, even as breath struggles to pass her rapidly paling lips. "I can keep you here indefinitely," Angela offers, opening her eyes. She wonders if she sounds sincere, wonders if, in Moira's place, she would hope she were sincere.

Wonders if she hopes Moira will say yes, if she wants to hold on to the fantasy of having her for a little longer.

"I'd rather not," Moira says, proud even in her resignation, and Angela sighs. "Will you watch?"

"Always," Angela says. She lifts the last syringe, runs a comforting hand along Moira's bony ribs.

And watches as the needle slides home and Moira O'Deorain is, at last, no one's at all.