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Weeks passed. Angela's smile and light returned with force and verve.
The morning after Fareeha had caught her crying, they'd found each other in the halls, in a rare moment of quiet. Angela had darted towards her wordlessly, throwing her arms around the taller woman's waist. Fareeha, at first taken aback, soon leaned into the embrace, hands meeting Angela's lab-coat-clad shoulders, and they had paused there for just a moment. Fareeha caught scents of rosewood and jasmine from Angela's cream-colored neck below, and for a second she felt her heart yank upward, as if on rockets of its own, battering against her breastbone as a quaking warmth spread downward (and downwards) towards her feet.
But then Angela had let go, a sad smile on her face and an unreadable expression in her sea-blue eyes. A mouthed Danke, a squeeze of Fareeha's hand, and off she went, gliding along, the picture of efficiency and togetherness once again.
The Egyptian kept an ear out for nighttime sobs—she slept little, ever since the Second Spring and its endless nighttime marches through the Syrian desert—but for weeks she heard nothing. She was happy about that, she supposed. (She tried to push down, in her best soldierly fashion, the part of her that wanted another chance to comfort Angela, the part that kept flashing back to the hours she spent awake, pressed against her back, hand between her breasts, feeling her heartbeat and gentle breath. She met with limited success.)
And during the day, Angela seemed stronger than ever. Meticulously swapping out the plastisteel rods in Genji's back for ones wrought of a riotously-expensive gold/titanium alloy; laughing hysterically after Hana, in an effort to elicit a rare smile from Zarya, reprogrammed all of Torbjörn's turrets to play a tinny Korobeiniki MIDI; even joining Reinhardt as he lustily belted out some forgotten 20th-century German pop song late one evening. The glow she cast was neither forced nor inauthentic: she just seemed to shine ever-so-slightly more forcefully than usual.
Until one night.
The previous few days had been hard for everyone. The Overwatch team had been airlifted from Gibraltar to Khartoum; their stated objective was to flush out a terrorist cell that had taken up refuge in a hospital. NATO peacekeepers had bombed it—an accident of war, they had called it—and in the chaos that ensued, this cell had taken over, plundering it for its supplies and machinery.
The approach had been perfect. Tracer, Genji, and Lucio had burst in through the front doors, eliminating the meager sentry force posted behind the admissions desk; Reinhardt and Winston had burst in through the emergency exits on the side of the building, neutralizing four enemy combatants in a pincer maneuver. Jack, Zarya, Mercy, and Pharah had rappelled onto the second floor and taken out the main enemy force.
What no one anticipated was that the hospital had not been evacuated after the bombing. Nearly every other room contained the corpse of a patient, with a terrorist bullet through the skull or the heart, lying helpless in their hospital beds or halfway out of their rooms in a futile scramble to escape. Executed, all of them, one-by-one, their morphine IVs and antibiotic bottles plundered. The heat and the stench (the copper reek of blood and the curdling fetor of long-evacuated bowels) were unbearable: Fareeha had seen Mei doubled over, retching quietly in a corner. Mercy had tried to resurrect the first two victims her team encountered, but the bodies were too far gone for even the Caduceus to work its magic.
Iblīs has come to this place, Fareeha whispered, invoking her native tongue. The Overwatch team had paced through the hospital, wordless, taking out the last stragglers. Fareeha had seen a look on Angela's face, as she pulled the trigger on one enemy scrambling towards his rusted AK-47, that she had never seen before—a look of rage. Righteous rage.
Now Fareeha is reading on her bunk, her room lit a soft gold by the oil lamps she prefers. She is reading something sad and poignant by Adunis, a thin paperback she had spotted in a street stall in the Arab district not far from Overwatch HQ. She lays her head back against the pale concrete of the wall, momentarily drowsy, closing her eyes, only to be shocked back into wakefulness by the buzz of her communicator on her desk. She gets up, unfolding her long legs from beneath her, and jabs, irritated, at the touchscreen. Two messages. From Angela.
Fareeha
Come up please
The irritation vanishes, replaced by worry. She tries to ignore the way her stomach flips and dives. She grabs a track jacket from the back of her chair and a pair of sweatpants from the floor and pads out the door, walking a touch too fast to be casual. Halfway up the stairs, she hears the muffled but unmistakable sound of broken glass, and abandons all pretense of sangfroid, taking the stairs two at a time, emerging from the stairwell and running the short distance to Angela's room.
Angela's room is lit only by her desk lamp. She is not in her bunk this time, but at her desk, not sitting but leaning, hunched forward across the desk, the chair's legs tipping ever so slightly in the air. She wears a thin slip, peach-colored, lined with white, billowing gently in the breeze from the air-conditioning.
Broken glass, beneath a fresh stain on the wall, twinkles in the half-light. There is a large, squarish, black-labeled bottle of brown liquid on the desk, and the sour scent of whiskey in the air.
It is coming from her, Fareeha realizes. She approaches Angela carefully, gingerly, in the manner one approaches a wounded predator. Angela, stuporous, is roused by Fareeha's gentle hand on her shoulder.
Fareeha half-whispers. "Angela… you wanted to see me?"
The Swiss woman turns around, and her face crumples. She looks down, gesturing sloppily with her hand at the broken glass against the wall. "Forgive me. I don't," her words slurring a bit, "I don't know what came over me."
Another pause. Fareeha finds herself at a loss for words.
"Seventy-eight percent," Angela mumbles, reaching for the bottle and swigging directly from its neck. Fareeha frowns. Winston takes a disapproving view of intoxicants on Overwatch premises; she must have stashed this away some time ago.
"Excuse me?"
"Seventy-eight percent. My field rescue rate."
A hiccup from the blonde. "Not good enough to save all those people." She buries her head in the crooks of her arms, leaning further across the desk, scattering her papers. "I've lost patients before"—another hiccup—"but this time… I didn't even get a chance."
"There was nothing you could have done, ya rouhi," Fareeha replies gently, barely noticing her term of endearment. "They had been dead for days. We could not have stopped it, no matter how early we were called." She leans in, working up the nerve to stroke Angela's glossy hair.
"No!" Angela yells, half-strangled. A hitched sob emerges.
"Angela, look at me. Look." Fareeha grabs her by the shoulders and pulls her up to face her. Angela's face is strong, her eyes flashing.
"There are some things you can't heal," Fareeha whispers. Angela eyes widen, her mouth opening as if to say something, and then crumbles, grabbing the front of Fareeha's jacket, bursting into tears—long, wracked, loud sobs, her slight body heaving with each one. Fareeha embraces her, lifting her, after a few seconds, into her arms—she weighs almost nothing, Fareeha notes—and sitting down with her on Angela's bunk. Angela cries and cries, barely pausing for breath, her tears soaking through Fareeha's camouflage jacket.
Lena peeks her head into the room, awakened by the noise and ready to ask questions: Fareeha catches her eyes, makes a finger-across-her-throat gesture, pointing for her to get out. Lena's eyes widen, but she gets the message and leaves, a slightly cast-down expression on her face. Angela, thank the stars, does not notice: she continues to sob, silently now, her body still quaking between labored breaths. Fareeha whispers soothing words in Arabic, her hands stroking the smaller woman, from hair to shoulder to back. They stay there, on the bunk, for what seems like a very long time.
Angela eventually pulls away from Fareeha's front, her face blotchy red from tears. She does not say anything, but merely looks into Fareeha's eyes, deeply, and suddenly Fareeha forgets how to talk, how to breathe, how to do anything except look back, into Angela's eyes, blue, deep blue, bluer than the Mediterranean in the morning light. She is the most beautiful woman she has ever seen, Fareeha realizes, more than any painting or sculpture. Fareeha has never written a poem in her life, but she now truly understands why poems are written.
"Danke," Angela whispers, and then quick-as-a-wink brings her lips to Fareeha's. Fareeha freezes up; her world all of a sudden very still. Angela kisses her, hard, needily, her lips soft, pressing fervently against the Egyptian's. Some seconds into it, Fareeha remembers that one should kiss back when being kissed, so she does: first tentatively, then stronger, rejoicing in the feel of Angela's lips, silent prayers and her own heartbeat hammering in her ears.
An eternity later, Angela draws away from Fareeha's lips, slowly and perhaps reluctantly. They are both scarlet now. Fareeha feels like panting. She burns inside, burns for this woman, this angel, older than her, yet somehow so young, so sensitive to the pain and the hurt of a soldier's life. She would move mountains for her, she realizes; she would dry up seas, would wrench the moon from the sky, would spit in the eye of any god or man who stood between them.
Angela blushes deeper, giggles lightly, and Fareeha's heart is pounding so hard that she fears it'll detach from her chest. She flops down to the bed, exhaustion in her face. "Can we… can we"—and here she hiccups, whiskey still heavy on her breath—"do that again?"
Fareeha, through some miracle, finds her voice. "Yes, ya rouhi. But…" She pauses, trying to find the right words: Angela is still very drunk, and Fareeha would die a thousand deaths rather than take advantage of her in such a state. "But later, okay? You must sleep now." Angela looks up, dazedly, and nods, and Fareeha's stomach unclenches. Thank God, she whispers internally. The last thing she wants to do in the world was reject Angela Ziegler. But now is not the right time. She sees the lines of exhaustion on the blonde's face and knows she has made the right decision.
She unzips her track jacket, still damp with tears, and tosses it over the desk lamp, casting the room into near-darkness. She adjusts the tank top beneath to properly cover her breasts (and blushes further at the thought of what Angela might do if she hadn't). She scoots down, lying next to Angela's prone form, and reaches for her. Angela buries her face in the base of Fareeha's neck, and Fareeha catches that scent, that warm, woodsy scent of jasmine and rosewood, stronger now.
"Guten nacht," Angela murmurs into Fareeha's shoulder, and Fareeha can feel the movement of her lips against her skin.
"Good night," Fareeha whispers, and within half a minute Angela is asleep, breathing steadily, uninterrupted by any sobs or tears. And Fareeha lies awake, gloriously, furiously happy, and yet burning inside, every flame whispering Angela, Angela, Angela.