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Moira likes you in the way a cat likes a mouse. There’s layers to the fun, and you’ve been in the “playing with your food” stage for a while longer than you’d have been willing to admit to anyone on the outside. In here though, where she’s free to run about and experiment to her heart’s content, well. . . You don’t have anyone to explain yourself anyway. Talon wasn’t your first choice, to be clear on the matter. In fact, before the fall of Overwatch and the subsequent destruction that waged on your city in the wake of it, it probably wouldn’t have been an option at all.
But you know better than most that sometimes things just don’t work out the way you’d hope. This was one of them, though there’s plenty of times when you’ve been able to swallow that fact a lot easier than you can right now. It’s not always so drab or hopeless, and the feelings come and go as they would if you were being holed up anywhere else. You try to soothe yourself by insisting that this place isn’t any worse than those well-protected shelters out there that monitor your food intake and your whereabouts at all times. In that sense, you’re sure you might even have more freedom than those subjected to those so-called havens spread across the world’s face.
You’re less stifled here than you probably would be at any of those safe spots, even if danger is more liable to lurk around the corners here. It’s give and take, —unlike this twisted thing you’ve got going on with Talon’s most notorious geneticist. That’s just give. Give, give, give until you’ve spread yourself so thin that there’s nothing left to offer, and then give some more, because she asks it of you. But she still cares in her own way. . . At least, you think she does. Or, maybe you’d just really like to.
It’s been a few days since you last heard from her, which isn’t particularly unusual. She’s a grown woman, after all, with her own endeavors that she often gets so lost in that time becomes a meaningless construct only serving to interfere with her work. Beyond that, she’s a top choice for field combat at Talon, despite much preferring to stay in the labs where the both of you have long agreed she belongs. Her, because it’s a preference, and you because it’s easier to ensure that she hasn’t gotten herself killed on the battlefield when you know exactly where to find her.
She didn’t tell you she was leaving this time. You chalked it up to a midnight ushering of her out of bed and off to some other place in need of defending for now, stifling worries that she’d just chosen to up and leave without telling you beforehand. Every other time, she’s mentioned it in advance, even if it always seemed more like a casual slip into a conversation than a true heads up for the sake of your sanity.
It’s not like you’re naive to what’s going on between you. As cold as many assume her to be, she’s not some reptilian creature posing as a woman in human flesh. She’s just as much a person as you, albeit quite a different one, —and sometimes she gets a little lonely. So when those cravings seep out and she’s in need of a fix, you’re the one she reaches for. But all the same, you’re replaceable.
“Doctor O’Deorain isn’t in.”
You pause in the hall, looking over at the man who’d spoken to you, —mid thirties, by the look of him, scraggly facial scruff and tired eyes. If he hadn’t said what he did, you’d have deduced as much by the exhaustion written all over his face. When Moira’s away, someone has to be there to pick up the slack.
“I don’t know when she’ll be back,” he explains, as if having read your mind.
Though you don’t recognize him, you’re sure he’s seen you come and go from her personal office every now and again. Nobody has ever dared to question it, granted, but you’re certain they must be curious about what happens behind that closed door. It’s none of their business, but human curiosity is seldom concerned with what it needs and needs not be piqued by.
“Okay, thank you,” you answer simply.
He seems confused when you keep walking down the hall toward the labs, but doesn’t bother to question it actively. Being part of Moira’s “in-crowd” must give you some kind of special privileges down here that you hadn’t been previously aware of.
The button on the outside of the door takes a lot more force than one might expect to press it inward, but you’re used to it by now. The two iron slates pull apart and give you access to the main lab, —one that branches into several other rooms, all of which have identical doors to the main entrance. These, however, are all guarded by fingerprint recognition software, and your hand only offers you access to a single one. . . That aforementioned personal office of Moira’s that, as far as you're aware, has only ever seen your face and hers since she took over its residency.
The main lab is empty, save for a few test rodents in their various containers. You pay them the same kind of attention you would if they were on display at a pet store and not sitting in wait to be experimented on. All white fur and red eyes, you whisper little greetings to them in the same way Moira has poked fun at you for in the past; only this time, she’s not around to snicker at you just under her breath. You kind of wish she was, though. It’s a dull ache, but not one that you can completely ignore in this nearly silent lab.
Hand against the sensor now, you wait for it to recognize and authorize your identity. When it does, the second set of iron slates come apart, granting you access to the small room behind. It’s nothing grand, in spite of Moira’s well-known status amongst the rest of the staff. As far as you know, she’s the only one who even has an office at all though, so its size isn’t much indicative of its importance.
It’s just as neat as it always is, —papers mostly filed away, and the few left on her desk neatly aligned and set off to the side. To be honest, you’re not completely sure why you even came down here in the first place. You could just as easily have gone to her apartment just a few blocks from Talon’s base of operations. She gave you a key a few months back after deciding that you could probably make more use of it than she did most days. That’s probably why you’ve found yourself here rather than there. . . The sheets of her bed smell more like you than her, but the lab coat draped across the back of her chair is rich with her fragrance; a little musky, a little citrusy, but still so feminine and divine.
You might often chase after Moira like a feline on the prowl, but make no mistake, —you will always be the mouse. No matter how many times you all but purr beneath her fingers, no matter how many times she has you mewling at her touch, you are and always will be the shivering little rodent to her devilish lioness.
“Am I really this foolish?” You mumble softly, a bitter laugh catching in the back of your throat.
You are. It's a rhetorical question, —you already know the answer, and you've known it perhaps since that very first kiss. No matter how often or in what manner, it's always nice to be wanted by her. . . To be desired by the kind of woman that lives and breathes on what often feels like a completely different plane of existence. Sometimes she speaks and it's like the world has caved in at her will, and you feel yourself crumble into pieces at her feet. She can look your way and leave you stuck with thoughts of her for hours, even days, to come; until she decides you're once again important enough to spare another glance at.
So yes. Yes you are really that foolish.
You stand around in her office for a while, fiddling with things you know she wouldn’t mind you touching, like her excessive collection of ballpoint pens and the fake succulent she keeps on her edge of her desk to “liven the place up.” Even if she isn't there right now, a part of you feels more connected to her here than anywhere else. It's where she beckons you to whenever she has an itch to scratch, —where she pushes you against the off-beige wall and kisses you until you're not sure what it really feels like to breathe anymore. It's where she sits in a variety of odd positions very befitting to her long legs and talks with you about the progress of her work, about the grievances she has in her day-to-day life, and sometimes, even about her past as a part of Overwatch.
It doesn't hurt that your opinion of the organization is about as positive as her's, which is to say it's rather low, all things considered. You found them to be undeniably underhanded and the fall of the organization was simply all too convenient, leaving people like Moira to pay the final resting price. . . Leaving people like you dispersed from the only real home you'd ever known.
So you made a new one amongst the rubble and destruction, and it's fucking beautiful. All smooth skin and ginger hair, —dual-colored eyes with lips like fire that set your heart ablaze.
You're thinking too much, you've concluded by the end of it, so you snag her lab coat and make your way through the winding halls of Talon's base. You're just another civilian they've taken in, convinced that because you survived the wreckage, you must be useful for something. . . That you were strong enough to make it out, and wise enough to accept their help. You're not sure how true you really believe that to be, but at least you're not alone sometimes. The quenching of your lonely ache might even make up for the various acts of horror you’ve been instructed to perform that you’d much rather forget about and pretend like they never happened at all.
When you’re with Moira, it’s a lot easier to pretend that you’re still an innocent. She wears the remnants of her perhaps more nefarious misdeeds on her own augmented arm, —always an angry shade of purple with protruding veins, and she never holds you with it. You still hold out hope that she might one day, when you’ve both grown much too used to one another and she doesn’t swallow “I love you”’s down like bile. You’re holding onto hope that one day she’ll call this what it is.
You flash Moira’s key at a Talon operaterive who asks where you’re going on your way out the door. Question answered, and she doesn’t even ask why you’ve got the good doctor’s lab coat clutched in your grip like a vice. Nobody has to say their worries out loud for you to know they’re festering just under the surface. They choke back warnings to be careful, to be mindful, to not let yourself get swept up in Moira’s game of life.
But the truth is, this is all you’re getting, and you don’t even feel like you’re settling. It could always be worse, and for whatever it’s worth, you feel pretty damn good when she’s around.
And when she’s not, you manage. Some times are better than others, though. This time, you’re somewhere in between lost and peaceful, okay with the quiet, but disconcerted with the lapse of warmth in her absence. So, you’ve found yourself here again, that spare key in the lock of her door, letting it swing open to this all too familiar place of near nothingness. Moira spends more nights in the lab than she does here, but there’s little traces of her splayed around, —like the bottle of red wine on the counter, or the few books she has on an otherwise barren shelf.
Past the wine and the books and the coffee table littered with syringes, you enter her bedroom and find yourself pausing, just looking around at everything (though you’ve likely seen it a couple dozen times before by now.) Her lipstick sits on the vanity shoved over in the corner, a reddish-orange color that you’ve watched her apply through half-lidded eyes in the early hours of the morning. That same color has stained your whitest shirt collars, and you’ve chosen not to wash those marks off just yet.
Pencil eyeliner, likely once sat right beside the other cosmetic, has rolled nearly to the edge now. She’s just as precise when she adds it to her eyes as she is when she measures chemicals in her lab. A little collection of nail polishes sit off to the side, —black, red, white, and the half-empty shade of deep violet that you see her don most often.
Her closet door is half open, slid away from the wall just enough that you can see a sliver of her collection of white button-ups hanging down from the rod inside. You wonder if they all smell as much like her as the lab coat in your hands, but you doubt it.
There you are again.
Foolish little you, wrapped in her sheets that hardly have a scent at all beyond the detergent she uses to clean them, her lab coat positioned just so that you catch hints of her with every breath you take in. You close your eyes and let lethargy win. It’s hours before you stir again, awakened by the rustling of Moira stealing her coat away from your grip. You don’t bother to open your eyes, letting her take it away and slip it on her lithe but surprisingly muscular frame. It’s hers, after all. . .
You imagine she must look tired, —but you know it’s not enough to make her stay. That’s never been enough of a reason. So you don’t ask for it. She’ll go from this apartment to her lab, and she’ll stay there for hours upon hours, from the early hours of the morning to egregious hours of the night, and somewhere in between, she might call upon you to stop by so she can tease you for taking the coat from her office, for sleeping in her bed while she was away, for stopping to wave to the test rodents, —and then she’ll press your back to that beige office wall, slit her knee between your legs, and take your breath away again.
Like she always does.
And you might even ask why she didn’t tell you where or when she was going when she left this time. She might even reward you for your nerve by cooking up some half-baked reply about responsibilities and authority and blah blah blah, all those things she’s told you a million times before in lieu of just being straightforward. You’ll take her explanation with a grain of salt as you always do, and she’ll sense your apprehension just in time to nip it in the bud, —hand under your chin, forcing you to look up at her, asking if you trust her.
You’ll say: “Yeah, of course I do. . . You know that,” even when that’s flimsy at best.
She’ll give you a smile that’s more reminiscent of a smirk before leaning in to hold you captive in her kiss. You’ll give, give, give, and give some more. . . Because she asks it of you.
Your thoughts still when she rests a hand against your head, smoothing it over your hair, petting you like a kitten.
But you’re still the mouse.
“Sleep well, darling.”