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Prisha is one of Torbjorn’s favorite apprentices, and young, and family-less in the wake of the Crisis, and that’s why he finds himself accompanying her to Overwatch’s oncology ward for her first chemotherapy appointment. Someone has to be there to hold her hand, take down the doctor’s instructions, rub her back when she vomits from the drugs. His Freja curls around her own little Aayush, trying to lend comfort where they can.
“You’re strong,” he tells her, wishing that human bodies could be fixed as easily as turrets. “You can do this, lass.”
The doctor they send in is secondary to the girl sitting besides him on the bed, clutching his fingers so tightly they turn white.
~
“Is she yours?” the doctor asks on the fifth visit, when Prisha is dozing fitfully on his shoulder.
Torbjorn stares up at her in confusion, and then Freja barks a little laugh when they get what the doctor’s angling at. “Oh! No, she’s one of my apprentices.” He pats at Prisha’s hand when she stirs, willing her to go back to sleep, and adds in a softer tone, “Poor lass doesn’t have anyone around to bring her here, though. Couldn’t let her go on her own.”
The doctor’s wolf wags his tail a little, tells Freja quietly, “Your human is a good man.”
“We try,” she replies, and the doctor smiles warmly at them both.
~
When they learn the cancer is in remission, he’s not sure if it’s him or Prisha that starts crying first. He’s not tall enough to swing her around, but Freja is big enough to toss Aayush into the air in delight, and the mynah flutters around the room squawking his joy.
“I told you!” he shouts happily, and she laughs and swipes at her tears. “You beat it, Prisha, you beat it to the ground!”
“Hooah!” she yells, mimicking Morrison’s fist-pump, and he grins and gives her another hug.
~
The day of Prisha’s last appointment, Dr. Eklund stops him with a gentle hand as he’s about to walk out the door. “Mr. Lindholm?”
“Yes?”
She and her wolf smile at him, the big animal’s tail wagging slow and sure. “Prisha’s no longer my patient, so I won’t be breaking any codes now if I ask you for a coffee sometime this week. When are you free?”
He’s too busy gaping up at her to answer, and luckily Freja saves him by blurting out a date and time.
“Perfect,” Dr. Eklund says. She steps around him to give Prisha congratulations and then is down the hall to her next appointment. He stares after her as she goes, still trying to process what just happened. When he turns around, Prisha and Aayush are giving him identical impish grins.
~
It turns out that Dr. Eklund’s first name is Astrid, that her wolf is Isak, that she’s been working in Overwatch’s oncology ward for five years, that her favorite color is red, and that she refuses to listen when Torbjorn tries to protest that she’s too young for him.
“I like you and I want to see how this will go,” she says on their first coffee date, after she’s rendered him helpless with splutters when he learns her age. “I don’t think anything else matters.”
“You should be chasing after young men with long lives!” He fiddles with his cup, fingers feeling clumsy and unsure. “Young men who couldn’t fire you! Aren’t you worried I’d take advantage?”
“Mr. Lindholm,” she says, and Isak grins up at him, mouth full of fangs, “do you really think you could?”
~
They go on more coffee dates, and then she asks him out for dinner. He ends up monopolizing the conversation out of nerves, until Isak rolls his eyes and pushes Freja over to get him to stop babbling long enough for Astrid to jump in. She tells him how the human body fits together, nature’s most amazing invention, and he falls a little in love.
When there’s a pause, he says, “Keep going. Please.”
She smiles at him. “I’m not boring you?”
“You’re an intelligent woman explaining a beautiful system,” he says, trying to sound as honest as he feels. “How could I be bored?”
“In that case,” she says, and goes on to tell him about how to drive out cancer with radiation.
~
“I want to see your labs,” she tells him on their eighth dinner. “You get to hear about my work all the time, you should repay me.”
Being head of engineering R&D has its perks, and he manages to get her a security pass by the next week. There’s a moment, when he opens the doors for her, that he’s struck by the worry that she won’t understand, that she won’t realize that this is his art, his life–
“Oh,” she breathes, eyes wide and delighted, Isak’s ears perking, and he realizes that he didn’t have to worry after all.
He’d planned to give her a quick tour, but they end up spending the day at his workbench, where he shows her clever fingers how to wire up lights and resistors and motors. She burns her thumb soldering, and just waves the pain off and keeps going.
“Are you trying to impress me?” Torbjorn asks, doing his best to hide that he is, in fact, impressed. Freja hops down from the bench to find a bandage. He’s glad that the setback didn’t deter her, but in a lab full of apprentices, safety standards should be upheld.
Astrid laughs at him. “If I wanted to impress you, I’d be soldering these more neatly!”
“For your first time, they’re good,” and he picks up the piece, turning it this way and that. “Nice solid connections.”
“I’m glad they hold up,” she replies, eyes crinkling in a smile, and lets him bandage her thumb with his work-rough hands.
~
Four months later, she calls him in the middle of the day. “I’m sorry,” she says, sounding distracted, “I can’t come out tonight, something came up–”
“Are you alright?”
She pauses, and he almost thinks he can hear Isak’s whine in the background. “Oh. You don’t have to worry. I just don’t want to ruin the evening.”
Freja perks her ears up when he frowns, leaning forwards so she can hear the phone conversation. “Astrid,” he says, trying to sound as gentle as he can, “what’s wrong?”
Another long pause. “We’re going to lose a patient.”
“Oh.” He swallows, tries to find the way forwards. He’s not clever with words, not like Morrison or Reyes, but he makes an attempt. “I don’t date you just for your sunny days, lass. What do you need?”
She lets out a shaky sigh. “Takeout, comedies, and maybe to cry all over your beard.”
“I’ll make sure it’s nice and soft for you,” he promises, and she hiccups a laugh.
“Thank you, Torbjorn.”
“Of course, dear one. Of course.”
~
She’s the one he rails to when he finds the mockery of a body they’ve made for the newest Blackwatch recruit. “They gave him omnic limbs!” he yells, stomping around her apartment, while Astrid and Isak watch from the couch. “He’s supposed to be a fast fighter and they gave him clanker legs!” Freja bristles on his shoulder, punctuating his words with snaps of her jaws.
Astrid is unfazed, and catches him by the hand the next time he comes within grabbing distance. “So fix it. That’s what your best at, isn’t it?”
It’s good, solid advice, and it stops him in his tracks. She gazes up at him, eyes clear and steady, and it’s what makes him admit, “I don’t know how.”
“Why?”
“That level of destruction? We’ve never made a prosthetic that extensive, it’s like we’re rebuilding the poor boy from the ground up!” He throws up his free hand. “It’s never been done before!”
“So be the first,” she says, and Isak trots off, comes back with an anatomy textbook. He holds it out, offering, and Astrid says, “Take your inspiration from the original inventor. Maybe you can even improve on it.”
Genji Shimada is the first to have a body built of air muscles, and the day he runs across the training room, free and flexible as the day he was born, Torbjorn goes home and thanks Astrid in every way he can think of.
~
For their third anniversary, he begs jewelry lessons off of Prisha, enduring her jibes and Aayush’s jokes to learn how to make Isak a jeweled collar and Astrid a necklace to match. Gold to bring out her freckles, and rubies for their favorite color, and good sturdy leather with suede lining so the collar sits comfortably on Isak’s neck.
He’s always done better talking with his hands than with his voice. By the look in their eyes when he and Freja show them the present, he’s done a good job of saying, “I love you.”