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The dreams are hard, when they come.
Angela, asleep, twists herself in her sheets, both her body and the bedclothes soaked with sweat at this point, 2:39 AM. She is dreaming of Belfast.
In any battle, the medic always sees the worst. Her grandfather, Herr Ziegler, had fought in Kosovo, in the wars of the late 20th-century; she remembered the afternoons spent at his knee, watching his hands as he rolled his cigarettes (despite her grandmother's constant haranguing: do not smoke around ze child, Otto, she vill get ze carcinoma), his fingers still strong and dextrous beneath the aged skin. Do not go to war, my child, he would say, sometimes, between his seventh or eighth glass of schnapps; we are healers, and to find something that cannot be healed, is to see Hell itself.
She had ignored those words, even though war had taken her parents. Twelve years later, she was top of her class at Stanford Medical; eight years later, the head of surgery at University Hospital Zurich, now Dr. Ziegler; another four, on the cover of Popular Science, holding up the nanomorphine patch she had designed and developed. And in fatigues, this time: off to Calcutta with the UN peacekeepers (her willingness to see her invention in action on the front lines being a central point of the article). Then Belfast. Then Addis Ababa. Then Pyongyang, and an airlift out of Pyongyang when shrapnel from a landmine embedded little chunks of steel all up and down her flank. Overwatch's agents came to her then, in the hospital in Taipei, while she was still half-out-of-her-mind on Fentanyl.
"How would you like to help heal the world?" Jack had asked, her vision blurry through the narcotics' halation.
Her distrust of Overwatch aside, she nodded yes, numbly. Because if she could heal the world, she could, by extension, heal herself. And she needed it.
2:41 AM. Angela is murmuring in her sleep now, strained gasps and susurrances, unmistakably of pain and panic. Her mind shows her the car, an old Ford, parked illegally on Ormeau Avenue, right where Ormeau intersected Dublin Road down which the parade (and the Prime Minister's motorcade) would extend. Her mind shows her the texture of the lieutenant's sleeve that she grabbed, looking at the Ford, convinced of its wrongness. Shows her the whiteness of his teeth as he speaks in reply, before the Ford explodes and everything becomes so loud and bright that there is only silence and darkness.
It shows her a small body, thrown across the street from the blast's impact, that lolls in her hands, lifeless, its blood seeping through its child-sized t-shirt, onto and into her uniform. Unable to be saved. And this is when, still asleep, Angela Ziegler begins to sob.
Fareeha is in the mess canteen, stirring a mug of jasmine tea, when she hears the sound. A hitched near-squeak, quiet enough for someone possessed of hearing less sensitive than Fareeha's to dismiss as just some sound from outside or in the guts of the building's heating apparatus. But she knows what she heard, and knows doubly when she hears it again.
Someone is crying.
She thinks of the kitten she rescued as a child, in the outskirts of Mallawi, of the piteous little noises it had made at her door, separated from its mother. How it snuggled its face into the crook of her arm, and the rolled eyes (and half-concealed smile) of her mother when Ana returned home to find Fareeha cradling a kitten.
She pads through the barracks, her senses tuning out the ambient and irrelevant noises (mouse-clicks from D.Va's room, no doubt exhorting some hapless fools to git gud in Platinum-tier Starcraft matches; soft chanting from Zenyatta's quarters, who obviously did not need to sleep but who seemed to appreciate his daily time alone; occasional mumbled obscenities from Junkrat's room, probably swearing in his sleep, the lunatic). She is clad in track pants and a loose-fitting sweater, barefoot, her copper skin vivid against the chilly steel floor. Her mug of tea lies steaming in the canteen, forgotten.
Fareeha suspects she already knows where these sobs will lead her, but she keeps her ears open, triangulating the sounds at their odd intervals, stepping quietly down the halls, until she arrives at the door labeled DR. ANGELA ZIEGLER. (Beneath it is written, in Lena's characteristic loopy hand, 'Mercy!!', with two exclamation points, and a smiley face and a heart for good measure.) Her stomach tightens. She hears another sob from behind the door, and her stomach flips, unclenches, retightens. She ignores it, and pushes the door open.
Mercy's quarters are predictably Teutonic and sparse. In the half-light, Fareeha can make out a desk, its pens and writing-paper well organized, a bookshelf crammed with the latest editions of the PDR and DSM and back issues of Lancet, a dresser with a mirror atop. And the scent of sweat, and a single bed, pushed against the wall, containing an unhappy form, twisted up in the sheets.
Fareeha considers turning on a light, announcing her presence, dealing with it roughly, as she did so many of her subordinates' nightmares during the campaigns of the Second Spring. But she does not. She pads lightly to the side of the bed. The light cast from Angela's digital alarm clock (3:09 AM) illuminates her face slightly, and shines gently on the tracks her tears have left on her face.
She sits on the bed, and feels Angela squirm, half-awakened, and reaches out to take Angela's hand in hers. Her hands are rough, scarred, pitted; Angela's are soft, fine, inconceivably delicate, tools for healing rather than hurting. She squeezes Angela's hand, and feels her squeeze back before the Swiss woman rises up, properly awake now.
She is topless, and Pharrah would have given dearly not to be the sort of person who notices this. She lets her eye linger for a split-second on Angela's breasts―firm, round, topped with small, dark areolae―before she brings her gaze back to Angela's eyes, and the tears that still well therein.
"Bad dreams?" Fareeha inquires softly, her hand still entangled in Angela's.
There is a pregnant pause, one in which Fareeha braces to be thrown out of the room, to be berated for invading the team medic's privacy. It does not come.
"Ja―yes," Angela gasps, her free hand pulling up the damp sheet to cover her chest, the other grasping Farrah's even tighter. She sniffles, and hugs her knees to her chest. The scent of sweat lies heavy in the room, though not unpleasantly.
"It sounded… hard," Fareeha near-whispers.
Angela sniffs again. "B-Belfast." A pause. "Much death."
Angela looks down, and for the first time sees that her hand is intertwined with Fareeha's. Fareeha fancies she can see the Swiss woman's eyes widen a bit, before she looks up at her, eyes still moist but no longer crying.
"You will… not tell the team, please. The younger ones, they… they need me to be strong." It isn't an order, nor a question, but Fareeha nods in confirmation. Nightmares on the parts of the younger soldiers―Hana, Mei, Lúcio―are par for the course, but there are certain roles that Angela, as medic, has to play. And word of PTSD-nightmares would be counterproductive to said roles.
Angela's eyes are still heavy with sleep. "Pharah?"
"Yes?"
"Will you… stay a little longer?"
Fareeha says nothing in reply, but swings her legs over the bed, finding a place to nestle beside the Swiss. She extends an arm, and Angela takes it, grabbing onto a scarred, strong wrist, holding it between her breasts. Her body is warm, and Fareeha feels her cheeks grow pink in the darkness.
"Danke." Fareeha says nothing in reply, but nestles up a little more firmly against Angela.
By the time Fareeha leaves, the digital clock reads 5:25, and no tear-tracts can be seen on the medic's face.