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You really shouldn’t have agreed to race Jesse down the hall, not in your stupid Cleopatra dress, but you do and you fall and scrape your knees anyway. Jesse lets you wear his hat—it smells of sweat and tobacco—when he carries you in his arms to the med bay.
He sets you down on the examination table, and Dr. Ziegler, ever the busy-body, is sitting there at her desk in her Halloween costume. She’s supposed to be a witch, your mother explained to you earlier when you saw the doctor without her pointed hat in only her skimpy black dress. Jesse replaces his cowboy hat which he swears is not the same hat he always has but is, in fact, a different one—in the spirit of Halloween—and he returns to the party.
Not long after, you hear your mother’s booming laughter down the hallway, and see Jesse breeze right past the med bay door, hat clamped down over the crotch of his fringed shotgun chaps. No doubt hiding a reaction your mother’s costume: Corporal Cutie, #164 in the catalog. When she walked out of the fitting room, you told her she was a disgrace to the military and Overwatch and all of Masr, and she laughed at you, strutting in her thigh highs and fishnets and army blue corset.
The doctor rolls her chair over to you, quite absorbed in the manila folder of files cradled between her long fingers, pointed black hat balanced on her golden head. She fascinates you in how she is only five years older than you, only eighteen, but somehow feels lightyears away. Like, if you were to age five years, you would still be hopelessly, helplessly, a child, and she, Angela Ziegler, the Swiss medical prodigy, will have lived another century. She is small, but you are smaller. She is a woman, you think, and you will only ever be a baby. It’s not because you are a baby—no, Uncle Reinhardt always tells you that you act wise beyond your years—but you think Angela has never been a child, and no one has ever seen her that way. You, however, will always be Ana Amari’s baby girl, the kid mascot of Overwatch.
She lowers her folder then, and sitting above her on the examination table, you are given an eyeful of her cleavage and her white thighs. You force your gaze elsewhere, your face terribly hot, clutching the edge of the table.
“Hello, Your Majesty,” she jests. She doesn’t appear to notice your discomfort or think anything of the show she’s giving you. And why would she? The last thing the doctor would expect is to be ogled by a confused, thirteen-year-old pervert.
You force out a laugh. You hate this stupid costume your mother made you wear. It makes you feel even more of a child, and you wonder how old you have to be to wear the witch costume the doctor has on. “Cleopatra wasn’t even Egyptian,” you mutter.
Dr. Ziegler laughs into her hand. Even her laughter, something that should be unbridled and unrehearsed, seems composed and ladylike, hitting all the right, dulcet notes. “That’s right, she was Greek, wasn’t she?”
You mumble your response. You don’t look at the doctor the whole time she disinfects and bandages your knees. Before you leave, she fingers the gold beads at the ends of your braids a moment. “These are pretty,” she says. And you think that you might just leave them on even after you’ve taken the rest of this ridiculous costume off.
That night you stand in front of the full-length mirror in your bedroom modelling your mother’s bra over your shirt, gold bobbles still in your hair, and you wonder idly if you’ll ever be the woman Dr. Ziegler is or that your mother is, even. They are beautiful, and what are you? You are tiny, your chest is flat, your hips are narrow. The space between your chest and the cups of your mother’s bra is like the distance from the earth to the moon, and you crumple in front of the mirror.
“What are you doing with my bra, ya habibti?” your mother chuckles. When she sees your tears of frustration she kneels to gather you in her arms. “Maalak, Fareeha?”
“I don’t want to be a child anymore,” you mumble into her collarbone.
She holds you at arm’s length, eyes taking in her bra slung haphazardly around your small shoulders. She seems to understand—call it mother’s intuition—what you mean to say without you having to say another word. “Well, first of all,” she says with a funny smile as she reaches around you to unclasp the bra. It falls away from your body. “This is a bra I wore when I was pregnant with you. So this is even larger than my normal bras.”
You blush and stare into your lap. “Oh.”
Her fingers lift your chin to look at her. You admire the tattoo beneath her left eye, and you think to yourself you want one just like it. “Second of all,” she murmurs, “you are still a young girl. You will be a woman, sooner than you think.” She snaps her fingers, and the sound startles you. “Just like that.”
“But what if I’m not tall enough or my breasts aren’t big enough or my hips aren’t wide enough?” The words slam into each other.
Your mother laughs. “That’s not what womanhood is, ya hayeti. It’s all in here,” she says, tapping your temple, “And in here,” she tells you, stabbing a finger to your heart. “Besides, who are you trying to impress with your big breasts and wide hips?”
“Ami,” you groan. Your cheeks are warm when Dr. Ziegler is the first person that comes to mind.
Your mother lets out a hearty laugh and hugs you tight. “Don’t rush to grow up, ya amar,” she coos, and she kisses your brow. “I only have one darling Fareeha.”
* * *
You wonder most of your waking hours if you want to be Angela Ziegler or if you want to kiss her.
You think about whom you really want to be—your mother—and how your mother is everything the doctor isn’t. She is coarse and strong and proud and she smells of smoke and gunpowder. You’ve worn her beret. You’ve cradled her sniper. And that was when you felt the most like you you’ve ever felt.
The doctor, she is none of these things. She is elegant and clean and reserved. She smells like bleach and rubbing alcohol. You’ve worn her lab coat. It’s stiff in the shoulders, and it feels empty somehow. She is nothing like your mother at all, and it would not make sense for you to want to be both of them, to be two contradictory things, at the same time.
You think you want to be something the doctor finds desirable.
You see her in the hall, lingering by the windows of the gym, watching Jesse and Jack and Gabe and Uncle Reinhardt through the glass. They are all big, strong men (well, Jesse isn’t but you’ll humor him when he flexes for you later that evening at dinner), all deserving of the doctor’s attention. The doctor pinches the end of her pen between her pearly white teeth as she watches on, and you watch her, mesmerized.
You’ve grown, as your mother promised you would, and you are as tall as the doctor is now, at sixteen, and you will likely grow more. You are tall, but you are not feminine like she is. You are clumsy and gangly. You are unformed clay.
You don’t think that matters so much when you see the doctor staring at the boys in the gym. They are graceful, like she is, and you aren’t, but there is something, too, in their strong physiques, that appeals to you much more than the idea of being able to wear the skimpy witch costume the doctor wore three Halloweens ago.
Uncle Reinhardt calls out to the two of you. “Angela, little Amari, why don’t you ladies join us?” he bellows as he spots Jack.
Dr. Ziegler turns to you then, a bit surprised it seems to find you there. She offers you a kind smile and tilts her head toward the gym. “I can’t, but you should.” She winks at you. “Doctor’s orders.” Her blonde ponytail swings when she turns to walk down the hallway. You catch yourself admiring the silhouette she cuts in her lab coat.
If she wants you to be big and strong, you will be.
You want to be for yourself. You’ve already acquired some muscle in preparation for your admittance to the army. It’s not the first time you’ve exercised with these boys, nor will it be the last.
Jesse throws you a clean towel, and you meet him on the mats to stretch. “The doc ain’t joinin’ us?” he asks.
“No, she was just ogling you boys. She has work to do,” you say, and you don’t like the bitter tone you take. It doesn’t become you.
Jesse scratches the back of his head, flustered. “Ah, I don’t think so. Probably wanted to make sure we weren’t doin’ anything stupid, keepin’ hydrated—doctor stuff.” You think that isn’t so unreasonable to presume. It certainly sounds like something she would do. “Besides,” he says, scratching his cheek, “I don’t really think the doc fancies the fellas. If anything, she’s probably ogling your ma.”
“Gross! Jesse!” you sputter, and he throws his head back in laughter.
“Man, Ana Amari,” he sighs dreamily, “she was somethin’ at that Halloween party of ’41.”
“Jesse,” you growl, and he grins at you.
“Hate to be the one to break this to you, Far, but your ma is one stone cold fox.”
You slug him in the arm and work out harder than you usually do, bench more than you usually can. You consider that maybe the doctor wore that witch costume to impress your mother, and it makes you work even harder.
When you lie in bed that night, aching all over, your head is clearer. You think about how you and the doctor are not so different. If she really does like your mother, as nauseating a thought that may be, she is in the same situation you are in: a girl, vying for the attention of an older, more experienced woman, hoping desperately she will someday be enough. You find comfort in that thought.
* * *
Despite all your efforts, Dr. Ziegler never gives you the time of day. You imagine the moment you leave for deployment, she’ll sweep you up in her arms and kiss you and profess her undying love. Those are just fantasies you entertain to pass the time. You know this because the moment do you leave, she doesn’t so much as hug you. Instead she watches from the side, smiling politely, and you can’t help but feel she cares more about your mother’s reaction to you leaving than your actually leaving.
You delight in the fact that she hates war—that she must hate you, by association.
Of course, you know that isn’t true. You know that Angela Ziegler doesn’t hate the things she disagrees with, but it helps you forget her in your absence. The golden light of her memory is dim in your mind, until she’s this forgotten warmth that doesn’t hurt anymore to remember.
* * *
When you see the doctor again it’s after fourteen years, after the Recall.
You are strangers, feigning recognition. There is nothing there of what you once were. You are a soldier. You are tall, and you are strong. You have killed. You’ve lost your virginity, perhaps not so coincidentally, to a field medic. You’ve lost your legs. You’ve lost your friends. You’ve lost your mother.
You wear the Eye of Horus proudly beneath your right eye to honor her memory.
“Gott, you look just like her,” the doctor murmurs, stroking her thumb across your tattoo as you stand in the rain outside the cab. She seems to see you for the first time. Granted, she sees you in your mother’s shadow, but she recognizes your growth in that comparison. She recognizes that you are the woman you wanted so badly to be, and not a child.
You want to hug her, but you feel she does not owe you that familiarity. She is different, too.
You count all the way she’s different when you’re sitting on the table in the med bay, waiting for your physical examination. You remember the Angela Ziegler who bandaged your scraped knees all those years ago and laugh at how you thought that had been a woman. No, she was a child back then, just as you were. This Angela Ziegler, right in front of you now, she is a woman. You get lost in the little things that make her so, that have changed about her, the white hairs that streak through the blonde, the wrinkles and smoky makeup that gather now around her blue eyes, the beautiful laugh lines around her lips. There is an almost dignified way in how she carries herself, sitting with her back straight and her legs crossed. She exudes poise and wisdom, and you wonder if you, Captain Fareeha Amari, venerated war hero, project the same kind of confidence.
The five years between you seem closer, but you can’t help feeling she still has experienced so much more than you have, that somehow you are still that child trying on your mother’s maternity bra.
The doctor bends over to get a pair of gloves from under the table, and you feel thirteen again, given another eyeful of her pale breasts through the V of her shirt. You turn your gaze away respectfully, swallowing the tightness in your throat. The doctor looks up at you and instantly recognizes your reaction, drawing shut her lab coat. “Laundry day,” she mutters, her cheeks red. “Sorry about that.”
You clear your throat. “I don’t mind,” you say, and it comes out more suggestive than your intent.
She catches you in your blunder and laughs. “My, how forward,” she says with a coy smile. You feel she is being polite, in part to keep up her air of professionalism, in part to put you at ease. You are colleagues, after all, and she is your doctor, and you are her patient.
You think about all the soldiers and Overwatch agents who must have sat in your place, flirting with the doctor. You’re sure they flirt with her, someone as lovely as she is, easing their pain—how could they not fall a little bit in love?
Dr. Ziegler swivels her chair away, snapping on her gloves. “Strip into your bra and underwear, please.”
“Who’s being forward, now?” you say. It shocks you how easily the words roll off your tongue, but you remind yourself you are not actually a blubbering, flustered mess. You are really quite smooth, and the number of women you’ve sweet-talked into your bed attests to that. But somehow, your charm is lost on you when you speak to the doctor. You think she knows all of your tricks already, that she has used them herself.
She looks at you over her shoulder and smiles, brow raised. “Still you, I think.” Where you should be met with caution or resistance, you find the doctor’s playfulness instead. It both delights and confuses you.
You strip and sit shivering on the table, your clothes in a heap beside you. When the doctor finally turns around, her eyes are wide and bright, and she has never looked younger. You forget all the years between you. You feel every bit the woman she is—that your mother was.
Her hand hovers over the seam between your skin and your prosthetic. “May I?” she asks.
You nod. You feel the warmth of her body through the latex of her gloves as she runs her hand along your thigh, along the sinews of muscle, and down the metal of your leg. “Beautiful,” she murmurs. Her eyes meet yours, and you’re very aware suddenly of how close her face is. “You’re very beautiful.”
You stifle a laugh. “Tell me, Doctor, do you usually feel up your patients?” You pretend to be offhanded, but inside you are trembling. You are afraid of how much she affects you, how much her opinion matters, even after all these years.
You lie in bed that night shivering at the huskiness of her voice when she said, “If I were feeling you up, I would touch much more than your leg.”
* * *
Jesse begs you not to wear Corporal Cutie to the first Halloween party after the Recall. “Please, Far, you’re like a sister to me. Don’t make me endure this.” You do it because your mother would have wanted you to, and because Lena has made one too many remarks about there being a rocket up your ass.
When you walk into the lounge, Dr. Ziegler is there, leaning against the kitchen island. Her eyes drag down your body. Ever the cheeky woman, she is in a scant nurse costume, and your eyes wander, too. She has bright red lipstick, a cropped white blouse tied at her navel with a red cross on either sleeve, and a short skirt over fishnets. When you find her face, she is watching you, smiling.
You ask her that night, with the help of some liquid courage, if she could provide the corporal with some medical assistance out in the field. She laughs and takes you into her room, and it’s not long before she is under you, gasping and shuddering as you pull open her blouse. You touch her breasts in complete awe, and remember the times you’ve seen glimpses of them. Somehow, they are even better than you thought they would be.
Dr. Ziegler—she urges you to call her Angela when your hand is up her skirt—lavishes you with as much admiration and attention as you give her. This surprises you more than you care to admit.
She is soon fast asleep against your body, tangled in the sheets, and it doesn’t bother you to know this can’t be forever. It is enough that you have invented your own brand of womanhood, and Angela Ziegler finds it—finds you—beautiful.