Work Text:
It’s her smile that Moira hates the most, she thinks, snarling into her coffee as Angela—Dr. Ziegler—gives a tired, yet genuine smile to one of their underlings: it’s a beautiful thing, so sweet it makes her teeth ache, and that’s why Moira hates it; her colleague has never once looked at her that way and the geneticist suspects she never will.
The idea disappoints her; she realizes with a start, acerbic despondency weighing heavy on her jaded heart—she’d thought she was better than this, was too old for this ridiculous juvenile puppy love, but that hadn’t stopped her from panting after the other woman anyway, buying her coffee (black) and pretty baubles that made Moira think of her. She’d left them anonymously on her desk late at night, when Dr. Ziegler was in bed or otherwise absent from the lab. The gifts had made the doctor’s lips curve into a bemused, jovial smile, and Moira’s old, cynical heart had beat in a frantic staccato against her ribs, just this side shy of painful.
What she wouldn’t give for the other woman to beam at her like that, to shine radiant and bright with her goodness and maybe that would be enough to finally fill the void inside Moira; maybe that would be enough to soothe her old hurts.
But it won’t. The name Angela means angel, after all, and though Moira has no room in her beliefs for religion, she is still hyperaware of the fact that most who know her name curse it, spit it like she is a witch, a demon, a monster. They aren’t wrong, but it only further serves to prove her point: she is twisted, amoral (not immoral, for fuck’s sake; she has her own strict code that happens to be looser than other’s), heinous, and a ruiner—even associating with the geneticist would ruin Angela, drag her pretty name through the mud and trample the halo from her head.
So she stays away.