Chapter Text
“I don’t know how to tell you this in a way that sticks,” her psychologist, Dr Singh, says and closes her notebook, levelling Angela with a stare that should be admonishing but the effect is lost on her. Her ability to feel shame left the Solar System a decade or so ago and it isn’t even a singular fun or sexy memory, just years upon years of moral compromises.
“Are you saying that I’m slow on the uptake?” Angela takes a sip of her water and uncrosses her legs and she doesn’t miss Dr Singh looking at her with an expression that would let out a weary sigh if it could talk, all forty-five or so years of her catching up with her at once and ending up in a single vertical line of depression between her furrowed brows.
“No,” Dr Singh says. “I’m saying that you want to misinterpret me and keep doing the same thing, again and again, hoping for a different result.”
“Isn’t that insanity?”
“Only according to Einstein.”
“He never said that,” Angela says. “It’s a common misattribution–”
“My point is–” Dr Singh shuts her off with a wave. “You need to accept that you can’t save everyone. Sometimes, you need to let people go.”
“Nine out of ten of my patients would take offence at that.”
She wants to add that the ratio is only not 10/10 because she sometimes self-diagnoses too and she has already let herself go but she knows that Dr Singh doesn’t find her funny so she lets the quip die inside her.
Dr Singh pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose and, for a second, Angela thinks she will indulge her and let out the tiniest, most professional of all chuckles but she only says, “Angela, I’m quite serious. I know you have fantastic, selfless motivations”–her words fall from her mouth in a manner so fundamentally insincere that Angela finds herself having to squash down a laugh–“but this... interest you have–”
“You can say ‘obsession’, you know,” Angela interjects. “I’m sure you wanted to.”
“That’s not an accurate term and you know it.” Dr Singh takes off her glasses and puts them on the coffee table next to the pitcher of water and Angela has to wonder if she is about to end their professional relationship. Finally. “You are being difficult on purpose today.”
“I am not partial to this topic,” Angela says.
“And I know that.” Dr Singh drums her fingers on the cover of her notebook but she doesn’t open it again and she doesn’t scribble down a quick note, even though her eyes linger on it and her thumb rolls over the top button of her ballpoint pen and Angela knows she is dying to click it. “It is my job to keep bringing it up, however, no matter how much it annoys you.”
“You are going to annoy my PTSD out of me?” Angela says and then finishes her water. “That’s a little unorthodox.”
She considers being annoying too and putting her glass onto the lacquered oak table. It would leave a ring of water and someone would have to grab a cloth to dry it up and it wouldn’t be her. She puts it on her coaster instead.
“Well, you are an unorthodox client,” Dr Singh says and pours herself a glass of water too. She is agonisingly slow, as though she wants to bait Angela to say something, anything, to fill the intermezzo in their session.
“Amélie Lacroix didn’t give me PTSD.”
And it is true too. Amélie Lacroix is only a single dot in a continuous line. A slope, really, downwards, straight into whatever state she is currently in.
“I suppose so,” Dr Singh agrees, “but she is a symptom of it.”
Angela purses her lips and only nods at her because a scoff is already laying siege to her throat and she has to apply superhuman strength to keep it at bay and keep everything from imploding. Dr Singh is the fourth therapist she is taking for a spin this year and it is only July. She has a terrifying feeling brewing in her windpipe, somewhere south of the ongoing siege, telling her that she is the One and she should hold onto her, the rarer-than-a-unicorn psychologist who sees through all her accumulated bullshit and will, eventually, force her to become a functioning human being again.
Despite all that, Singh is wrong.
Amélie Lacroix is not a symptom.
Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe is.
***
two months ago
“I just want my–ke back.”
Ashe’s voice breaks up and turns into static noise and then her face, plastered all over Angela’s smartwatch screen, freezes into a half-smirk that makes her look sleazy before she gets cut off. In the sudden darkness illuminated only by the brightly burning end of Jesse’s cigar, Angela can see the phantom colours of Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe everywhere she looks, scorched straight into her retina. She rolls her eyes.
“She wants her bike back,” she repeats, very helpfully, and Jesse huffs.
“Bike? Are you sure? Maybe she said dy–”
She slaps his shoulder with the back of her hand before he could finish and he yelps on instinct. Angela is pretty sure it hurts her more than it could ever hurt him.
“She could have anything but here she goes: coveting my bike,” Jesse mumbles around his cigar.
“Ask Winston for a new one, I’m sure our budget can handle it,” Angela says and checks the signal on her watch again – completely dead. “Are we in a lead coffin?”
“Pretty much.”
“Do we not need back up?” Angela asks and taps the screen one last time. “Because we won’t get any this way.”
Jesse turns on the flashlight attached to his cowboy hat and shrugs as he says, “Ashe is a businesswoman, not an idiot. She doesn’t want Overwatch agents crawling all over her.”
I suppose she only wants you crawling all over her, she wants to say because she knows it would irritate Jesse, maybe as much as it irritates her. She lets the words sit on her tongue but she doesn’t release them. She isn’t sure where she stands with him after all these years of patchy contact and never taking the time to catch up until they were both thrown right back in the middle of the very angry beehive called “world politics” and trying to not get swallowed up by the swarm. Doing the right thing, the good thing, the upstanding thing, or whatever makes her sleep easier at night. Tonight, it is fumbling through a damp and musty tunnel that supposedly leads to an abandoned safe house somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Angela feels positively insane.
“This could be a trap,” she reminds him.
“It’s not.”
“You don’t know that.”
“And you do? Then why did you volunteer to come?” He adjusts his hat and they lose the light. Angela immediately kicks into a baseball-sized stone and sends it slamming into the metal wall. The stone ricochets with a deep clang that echoes through the tunnel, much like Angela’s swearing breaking free before she could rein it in.
“Futzing around? Really?” He laughs then, a deep, rumbling sound. “Does working as a borderless doctor age you thrice as fast?”
“I said fotze,” she says and limps on, determined to leave him guessing, “and it is Doctors Without Borders and I’m not affiliated with them.”
“I know. Angela, I know,” he says and he sounds apologetic and it grips something inside her. “It was a joke. I am trying to alleviate whatever this tension is.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m a bit in my head.”
There’s nothing else to say. Angela doesn’t know how to tell him how weird being back in commission is, how weird it is that she cannot confide in him anymore, how she cannot tell him she only volunteered because she wanted to do something, be useful, and the only other available mission would’ve put her up against her (and she absolutely can’t fucking go there).
“More like Ashe got in your head,” he says and before Angela could protest, he continues, “I’m not blind. I know you two…”–he trails off then and whistles a low tone–“have unfinished business together.”
“Must you do this?” Angela moans out. “That was almost ten years ago, Jesse. Trust me, it didn’t even cross my mind.”
“If you say so.”
“I say so,” she lies and then lies some more, “I wouldn’t even remember it if you didn’t keep bringing it up.”
***
“almost ten years ago”
“Gabe…”
“No, Angela, listen.” Reyes sounds desperate and Angela knows it is a well-calculated act to make her roll over like a dog. Still, she is glad she isn’t on video chat with him because she can’t handle his pleading face. There is something wrong about him attempting a puppy face, kind of like a dream that isn’t a nightmare per se but slightly disturbing and offputting nonetheless and it makes her break out in a sweat. “Sooner or later someone will decipher that flash drive and we need to get ahead of that. We must get that data, you know I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t important.”
“Of course, I understand,” she says and, truthfully, she doesn’t care, “but I’ve been trying to disentangle myself from Overwatch for a while now and the last thing I want is to get caught up in whatever you are doing.”
“You are not ‘getting caught up’, don’t worry,” he says and Angela isn’t convinced. “I’m asking you to escort McCree because the moment he opens his stupid mouth, he is made.”
Angela sighs and then bites down on the side of her thumb, a nervous tick she picked up a few years ago until it hurts enough to raise her from her stupor. She can already see it coming: she is going to be sentimental. Reyes knows this too.
How well played.
She has known Jesse since they were barely adults and they spent a significant portion of their lives orbiting each other like two strangely incompatible satellites. Sending off weird, jumbled messages about potential dates or maybe-possibly-perhaps hooking up that neither could decode until they got tired of their miscommunication and decided that they were better off as friends. And they were. So much better. Where Jesse fell in love and fell in bed with every person he met, Angela was guarded by fifty layers of self-preservation. Never willing to make a move, never willing to risk her heart or her sanity, always putting the Cause ahead (with a capital “c”), always lonely, always successful. She anchored him and he coaxed her out of her shell in return. They evened each other out. Now, she supposes, she has to be an anchor yet again because Jesse is spiralling down the drain in a tub called “Blackwatch” and no one else is throwing him a lifejacket.
“His German accent is pretty unconvincing,” she agrees. “For the record, mine should be too. I don’t speak Swäbisch.”
“You’re still a better bet than him,” he says and Angela can’t argue with that. “Look, you are already in Stuttgart, you are capable and, most importantly, McCree trusts you. We don’t have an option B.”
“So, I’ll just have to mingle with war criminals and pretend that I’m some Swiss heiress with money to burn and a penchant for bloodshed?”
“You already have it all down,” he says and laughs a little, his low voice rumbles deep in Angela’s ears. “You go in, eat some cocktail shrimp, down some champagne, play some blackjack or whatever rich assholes do at casinos,” Reyes says, “and when the time comes, you bid on the Volskaya flash drive.”
“Shouldn’t I bid on something else too?” She asks. “It’s a bit suspect when some nobody arrives at your private auction and only wants one thing.”
The line goes silent for a long moment and then Reyes says, “Point taken. Do whatever feels right.”
Angela wants to tell him that none of this feels right but she cuts the line instead and dials Jesse.
***
She spots Jesse at the blackjack table and she nearly misses him. He looks dapper, albeit underdressed in a black suit and a bow tie, and his slicked-back hair makes Angela do a double-take.
“Du bist wunderschön, mein Schatz,” he says after he throws in his cards and scrambles off his chair. Angela wants to crawl under a table and die.
“Just...Don’t.”
“What?” Jesse shrugs and takes two martinis from an omnic butler in a tuxedo as he passes the pair of them and then hands one over to Angela. “I thought my enunciation was pretty good.”
“It wasn’t.” She clinks their glasses together and downs her drink in one go and Jesse snorts at the display.
“You do look nice, though,” he says as he reaches over to scoop up the olive she left untouched. “Black suits you.”
He doesn’t elaborate so Angela can’t tell if he means her hair or her dress but she takes the compliment anyway because it’s been a while since she felt worthy of appreciation outside her job. Despite what she tends to tell herself – that desirability is not the goal and her worth is not measured by surface-level attraction, sometimes she does like to be reminded that she is a whole, entire, warm-blooded woman behind the surgical mask and under the apron and–
She looks at the omnic butler again, the way he idles by some guests and engages in small talk, one hand holding up his plate of drinks, the other planted on his hips.
How human, she thinks.
What do I know, she thinks.
“Well, black suits you a lot less, wouldn’t you say?” She says and watches as Jesse pulls a face before he moves to drop the olive pit in an ashtray. “But you clean up well. I’m shocked you got rid of the beard, though. I thought it was superglued on.”
“Well, I guess that’s my flavour of incognito,” he whispers. “I haven’t gone for the clean-shaven look since–”
“Jesse McCree,” comes a voice with a distinct twang with each syllable drawn out, and they spin around in synch to face the source like two amateurs, “Been a while.”
She’s beautiful.
Angela’s thoughts punch her in the jugular as she looks over the woman dressed in red, tapping her index finger to the side of her champagne flute, and she wants to scold herself. So stupid, so inappropriate. After all, she is in a room chock full of people who are all various levels of atrocious: mafia members, money launderers, art thieves, smugglers and drug lords. There’s even one guy who set up a Ponzi scheme and defrauded an entire Midwestern city. This woman, stunning she may be, is going to fall into one of those categories and Angela can only hope she is some garden variety bank robber and not a human trafficker because she doesn’t want to have that on her conscience.
Angela Ziegler, medical researcher, frontline medic, owner of brief sexual fantasies involving terrible women.
For that, she blames her multiyear romantic drought and however long it has been since she slept with anyone in a fashion that didn’t leave her high and dry.
“Ashe,” Jesse says and he looks pained before he collects his face back up into neutrality. “I see you move in new circles.”
“Not a circle. It’s a spiral and it’s going way up,” she says. “I thought you were running with cops now.”
“You know me,” he says. “It took me only a month to land myself back in jail.”
“You couldn’t lie yourself out of a bucket.” Ashe leans forwards and lowers her voice. “I could get the security on your sweet ass in seconds, you know that, right?”
“Would that be a satisfying conclusion to our business?” He says and proceeds to sip his martini as though none of this bothers him but Angela can feel the soft, rhythmic tapping of his boots against the wooden floors.
“Eh, you got me there. I like a more hands-on approach.” Ashe reaches over to clink her glass to Angela’s empty one and flashes a smile at her as she goes. “I’ll have my revenge, sooner or later. Cheers to that.”
“We don’t want trouble,” Jesse says. “I won’t cross you if you won’t cross me.”
Ashe nods at that and gives Angela a once-over that is drawn-out enough to be infuriating, then she says, “Introduce me to your boss, would you?”
Angela doesn’t know if it’s a genuine mistake or this woman is only playing with her head, messing with their dynamics on purpose to throw Jesse off but a small part of her, the one thirsty for recognition, enjoys it.
“Elizabeth Ashe–”
“Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe,” she corrects him. “But you can call me ‘Calamity’ if you will.”
“I don’t think I will,” Angela says.
“–this is Astrid Winzenried from Bern.”
“The hell she is but I’ll indulge y’all,” Ashe says. “Nice to meet you, Ms Astrid Not-A-Cop.”
“I really am not a cop,” Angela presses the words through her teeth and past her lips drawn into a tight grin.
“If you say so.”
“I say so,” she says and signals a waiter for another martini.
***
Ashe doesn’t blow their cover. If anything, she is a godsend – the most authentic accessory Angela could hope for, especially now, when she is kibitzing her texas hold ‘em game, sitting behind her and looking over her shoulder, whispering about probability and the art of bluffing, too close for comfort. Angela doesn’t mind her goosebumps and she doesn’t mind her skin prickling because Ashe is a businesswoman and she knows how to sell her too, as her criminal partner, her squeeze, her wife, she isn’t sure anymore, but it works and she is a hot commodity now. Ashe would deserve an Academy Award for her performance, even if her only muse is Jesse’s never-ending eye-rolling. Jealousy and spite bring the best out in her, apparently, and Angela isn’t about to complain.
“Go ahead and end him,” Ashe murmurs into her ear and Angela is every bit the hero she is: she doesn’t shudder, she doesn’t let the sigh out of her chest no matter how much it presses against her lungs, she only allows the faintest flutter of her eyelids. She deserves some kind of an award too.
“All in,” Angela announces and pushes her chips towards the middle of the table.
Ashe hums at that, then she pulls her gun out of her purse. A quick silence falls upon the table and Angela can see the other players shift in their seats. The dealer sways somewhat as his right hand inches towards the small of his back, going for a handgun tucked away in his cummerbund, Angela’s certain. The man, her main rival, or so she likes to think, a beefy Russian with rosacea and three-hundred pounds of muscle, puts his palms on the table, ready to rise. Then, as if on cue, Ashe reaches an arm over Angela, the skin of her forearm breezing past her cheek, touching it so lightly she could almost think it an accident, and tosses the gun atop the pile.
“It’s an investment,” she says and the entire room seems to exhale. A sonic boom.
“I fold,” says the omnic woman in a caftan sitting across Angela and she throws her cards in. She was never a threat; for someone with no discernible facial expressions, she sure can’t bluff to save her life.
The Russian looks at Angela, at Ashe, at the gun too and then takes off his Doxa – it’s a chunky and complex piece, an impractical status symbol – and adds it to the pot, as gently as though he’s cradling his own child and guessing by the amount of sweat that leaves his pores at its departure, Angela thinks it may as well be just that.
“All in,” he grunts then, as an afterthought.
He has two pairs.
Angela has three of a kind.
***
Gabriel Reyes told her to do whatever feels right.
He probably didn’t envision this outcome. Nevertheless, it feels right.
“You can have it,” she says, looping the watch around Ashe’s free hand, the one that isn’t busy drawing the alphabet across Angela’s chest, her fingertips sliding over her breasts in seemingly slow motion like it is some home-made martial art movie and she is just waiting for the double speed edit. It is infuriating. Half of Angela’s brain wants to tell her to get on with it because they have a midnight auction to attend but the other, more dominant, needy part tells her to shut up and enjoy this torture while it lasts. With that, she has nearly run out of brain capacity and it might be a blessing this time. Otherwise, she’d have to think more about her circumstances, how she is lonely and desperate and unprofessional enough to be half-naked with her back to a supply closet wall at a casino, her dress pooling around her waist. How she is about five minutes of foreplay away from a strange woman fingering her who is definitely on some Overwatch most wanted list, who may or may not be Jesse’s ex, who is currently making her legs tremble like she is some doe on the interstate at four in the morning in direct reflector light. She might get hit too.
“I’m more of a Patek Philippe girl myself,” she adds when Ashe slides her other hand, now adorned with the Doxa, from her shoulders to her neck – deltoid, trapezius, platysma – and when Angela swallows, her throat tightens under her fingers. Ashe must feel it too because she moves to cup her jaw instead and it takes a lot of self-restraint to not lean into that touch.
“I didn’t know you were that kind of a rich girl,” Ashe says and laughs. “Do you want me to burglarise your place? I’m free this weekend.”
“You are hilarious.” Angela grasps the hand on her chest and presses it into her skin and Ashe’s long, cool fingers splay so beautifully against her heated skin, she almost wishes she could see herself with Ashe’s eyes. She doesn’t recognise her own need anymore. It would be nice to get a repeat introduction. “I don’t give a fuck about watches.”
“You wanted to reward me, I get it,” Ashe muses and pinches her nipple, just a bit, and it is way too soft to hurt, and if Angela lets her mind spin out of control, she can even read some tenderness into her motions. “I did quite a good job, didn’t I.”
“You did,” she sighs out. “Wait, is this your thing? You get off on praise?”
“Give credit where credit is due,” Ashe says and snakes a hand to the back of Angela’s left knee and pulls at her leg. “That’s my philosophy.”
Angela hooks her leg over Ashe and with that simple, fluid motion that feels rehearsed, they are hip to hip, chest to chest, cheek to cheek. She hasn’t had that in so long: the solid warmth of a body against hers, the beat of someone else’s heart in her ribcage. Even the callouses, she thinks, on Ashe’s palm feel goddamn intimate. If she was a tad less sober, she would sob at that realisation.
“I’ll certainly credit you,” Angela whispers against her chin. “I’ll name you in my report.”
“You’ll tell them you ran into a bit of a calamity?”
“Oh, you are fast.” She kisses her chin then and Ashe inclines her head, enough to press their lips together and it isn’t a searing kiss. There’s nothing romantic about it and yet, Angela’s head is heavy and her pulse is Chopin’s Minute Waltz .
“I can be faster,” Ashe says and pulls away to look at her watch. “We only have twenty minutes.”
“I can work with that,” Angela says.
And she does. Twice.
And as she comes back to reality, she thinks this would be all the more gratifying if it wasn’t only about getting back at Jesse McCree.
***
two months ago
“Jesse McCree,” Ashe drawls and dramatically spins around in her chair to face them. “Been a while.”
The years have been good to Ashe or, perhaps, it is the clothes. She looks more in her element in her loose shirt and her vest and her cowboy hat than she did in her gown back in Stuttgart, ten or so years ago, in the half-light of the supply closet, surrounded by bottles of lye. She considers telling her that with those exact words. She doesn’t.
“How long have you been sitting there?” Angela says and looks over at Jesse who is messing with his headlight instead of looking at them.
“Not too long,” Ashe says. “I could hear you coming from a mile away so I had all the time in the world to prepare. Did someone kick the wall?”
“I kicked a stone,” Angela says and walks up to the crate next to Ashe that hopefully contains the black market weapons they came for.
“Did you break a toe?”
“I did not.”
“I’m glad to hear that.” Ashe fiddles with her hat and then adds, “It’s a pain in the ass I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies and you don’t even breach my top ten.”
Somewhere, underneath her clipped replies and her fifty layers of utter bullshit, where she is drowning in idle nostalgia, Angela would prefer if this exchange wasn’t mere courtesy between old adversaries. It’s delusional, of course; they both went on with their lives after Stuttgart, or so Angela assumes. She sometimes reads a report here and there but she has made sure to skip out on any mission against the Deadlock Gang, much like how she steers clear of Talon now because that is what she does best. Avoidance. Evasion.
“I knew you were a blonde, Astrid.”
“Well, you would,” Angela answers too-quick and Jesse groans behind her.
Ashe gets out from behind her office table that was obviously put there as an elaborate joke because the safe house is nothing but an empty barn with a few lightbulbs hanging freely to provide some lighting.
“Let me help you with that,” she says and grabs the crowbar propped against the side of the crate to pop the lid open with it.
Angela doesn’t sneak a peek. She is looking at Ashe’s wrist, at the Doxa that looks like it was shot at an odd angle, its glass cover shattered into pieces but held together by what she assumes to be resin. It is matte now, no longer reflecting the orange glow of the lamps. She doesn’t know how to feel about the possibility that maybe, just maybe, nothing had anything to do with Jesse McCree or vengeance. She chose this mission because she thought she would be less affected. Her life is really quite funny.
“So”–Ashe follows her gaze to her hand and her brows twitch so slightly Angela wonders if she imagined it–“where did you park my bike?”
Jesse is burning a hole into her skull now and she wants to tell him that he is wrong, that there’s nothing unfinished about this business and that she can, in fact, let people go. But she doesn’t because out of the three of them, Ashe is the only one who isn’t a hopeless liar. As she is staring Angela down, daring her to flinch, looking almost kind, she is the most masterful of all the liars.