Chapter Text
Gérard Lacroix’s wife makes a pretty picture spread-eagled in her marriage bed with her lipstick smeared and her eyes glazed over. She’s coming down from her third orgasm, and her whole body heaves as she catches her breath. Even sweaty and limp, she’s gorgeous, which is almost enough to drown out anything else Moira might be feeling. Moira’s wet too, underneath her trousers and underwear, and for a few minutes perhaps she can just enjoy that. Enjoy fucking her superior’s wife while he’s hundreds of kilometers away and none the wiser.
There certainly is much about Amélie to enjoy. At Le Papillon earlier in the evening, Moira’s attention was really only for the female lead, who played the titular butterfly to perfection. Her long legs were strong and graceful while she spun and held herself up en pointe, but Moira likes them better draped over her shoulders. Her arms matched each pose with a surgeon's precision, but they are better-suited to wrapping around Moira’s back and digging greedy nails into her shirt. Her face portrayed each exquisite expression required to tell a story without words, but it is much prettier in the throes of pleasure.
A private dance, Moira thinks. One just for her benefit. Perhaps Gérard hasn’t even seen his wife like this, if he can’t be bothered to come home and touch her every now and again.
Amélie has enough energy left to wrap a hand around Moira’s tie and pull her down. Their mouths crash together, not quite matching each other’s movements, with Amélie still hot and needy and Moira doing as good a job of it as she ever does. She’s much too warm; Amélie divested her of the suit coat but nothing else, and Moira’s undershirt is clinging to her sweaty skin and the cuffs and collar of her button-down feel too constricting.
Not that she deserves to be comfortable, given who she is and what she’s doing.
“Spend the night,” Amélie says. It comes out like an order, but Moira looks down at her face and her naked body and sees it for the plea it is. A married woman lonely enough to bring home a stranger who introduced herself backstage as a coworker of her husband lacks the leverage to order. She invited Moira to fuck her in order to feel wanted, and now this is more of the same. She wants a reassurance that she is not reprehensible enough to leave alone, that there is enough of her to satiate until the next morning at least. Moira is certain that she herself is irrelevant to that equation; Amélie sees her as a means to an end. It would disturb her more if it were a less familiar feeling, and if the sentiment wasn’t true the other way around.
Moira is bored of playing. In lieu of responding, she digs her teeth into Amelie’s throat again. Her fingers plunge back into the chasm between her thighs, so open and wet for her that she can fit three without a stretch.
She listens and feels Amélie’s moans, how her responsive body shivers and bends and rocks against her. She enjoys these forbidden fruits for a moment longer before withdrawing, leaving the young wife staring up at her with her doe eyes wide and pleading.
“Un moment,” Moira husks, offering her a kiss on the forehead before turning her back in search of the bathroom.
The mirror hung above the sink is splattered with dried toothpaste and specks of saliva. The white paint of its frame is chipping away in places to reveal the old wood underneath. Nobody’s cleaned it in months, she’d wager. Maybe years.
She is still the most lopsided thing in the aging bathroom. Even with water splashed over her skin she still feels greasy. Her skin looks stretched and pallid; insistent wrinkles are beginning to form around her mouth and eyes. You are getting older, they crow, and her stomach twists with all the horror of a prettier, younger woman with much more to lose to age.
Well, maybe not much more.
She takes a mental inventory while her hands shake against the porcelain. Memory? It seems she’s remembering less, but that could be the stress of the past months, the weight of her own mounting expectations, Gabriel driving them all to the breaking point. Frustration? When is she not frustrated. Impulsivity? Well, certainly this is impulsive, shacking up in an apartment not her own with a woman she’s been on a first-name basis with for a handful of hours.
In the dim light her red eye appears more muddy brown. A shit eye. How appropriate.
Downhill, she sneers at herself. But when has she not been going downhill? Can any segment of her life properly be considered an incline, or has it just been decade upon decade of digging a grave?
She takes off her tie and unbuttons her shirt enough that she feels like she can breathe again. She’s tired. That’s one box unchecked, at least. She can still sleep. It sounds vaguely pleasant to take Amélie up on her request and spend the night in Gérard Lacroix’s bed with her arms around his wife. An excellent way to abandon the fact that, whatever flimsy excuses she gave Gabriel and herself, this was the reason she came to Paris. She can’t retaliate against her superior’s slight directly, so she takes what she can instead.
Amélie is not a thing. She deserves better than a husband who leaves her alone and a lover who fucks her and forgets about her. Moira will not be that better thing, but she acknowledges that Amélie deserves it, and acknowledging it feels close enough to washing her hands that, when she decides she will not be spending the night, she doesn’t feel guilty at all.
Outside, Paris is dark but still lively. Moira intends to head for the metro, and then Gare du Nord to catch a train back to Zurich, but she can’t muster the necessary energy to get her feet to move. She leans against the old brick of a church near the Lacroixs’ apartment. She feels nauseous and her head is pounding as if she had much more to drink than a single glass of wine during intermission, hours ago.
Why did she do this? Did she expect it to feel good? She knows how these things go, and she was surely not stupid enough to imagine that this time would be different—no, she’s just determined to retrace her steps over and over again, determined to redo an experiment a hundred times if she must even as the evidence piles up that her hypothesis was a failed one from the start.
“Moira, you’re slow! You think an omnic couldn’t get you while you’re running like that? Put your heart and your ass into it or we’ll use real weapons next time as incentive.”
She curses Reyes in every language she can think of while she huddles behind the makeshift barriers of the training floor. She hears McCree’s footsteps, quick and loud, from the right, and she forces herself to her feet again to prepare herself. Maybe she can get the draw on him, and end this farce of a simulation—
But her little practice pea-shooter is barely raised before McCree is around the corner, and he’s pulled the trigger, and the sensors are blaring to indicate she’s dead, yet again.
“Sorry,” McCree says jovially. “Hey, I think it really was better that time.”
“Yes, thank you,” she brushes him off crisply. She lowers the gun and glowers up at the overhanging balcony, where their commander watches them with inscrutable eyes.
“All right, that’s enough,” Reyes decides. “Jesse, you’re dismissed.”
Moira is relieved, or would be relieved if shame and anger at her own pitiful performance weren’t burning through her like acid. Why does he insist on continuing this sham? Does he get off on watching her fail, again and again? Does he know what it does to her to be forced into this, to be unable to succeed no matter how many times she’s put through the paces?
When Reyes finally joins her on the training floor, his gaze is even and unreadable. He doesn’t look disappointed, although he must be. Nor does he say anything; he waits for her own temper to boil up and over. Moira knows that’s what he’s doing and hates to be predictable, but she is too angry to stay her tongue.
“Shall we do this again tomorrow, or do you realize what a waste of time it is?”
“It’s not a waste of time.”
“You hired me for my contributions to the field of genetics, not gunplay, and I could be doing what you pay me for right now if it weren’t for these fruitless exercises.”
“Then how are your contributions to the field of genetics coming?” Reyes waits a heartbeat, interprets her furious silence correctly, and continues. “We need a field medic, and I’m not taking anyone with me who can’t defend themselves. So you’ll learn, and then it’ll be you.”
“Why not teach McCree how to wield a syringe?” She doesn’t bother to differentiate that a Ph.D. in human genetics and genomics renders her about as qualified to be a medic as a missionary. Once he gets his mind on something, it is difficult to dissuade him. Unfortunately, his instincts are usually impeccable, which undoubtedly swells his head and leads him to more errant conclusions, like this one.
“Cute. I know you can do it. Just try, Moira.”
“I am trying,” she says, and if it’s through gritted teeth he doesn’t need to know that.
He looks her up and down.
“Do you know Ziegler’s working with Amari? She’s learning how to shoot. A pacifist barely out of school, but she wants in the field.”
He plays her like a fiddle and she knows it, but she can’t help her reaction even when she knows it’s exactly what he wants.
“Why should I care what she’s doing,” she says, the hostility in her voice undermining her words.
“Just thought you’d be interested.” His brown eyes bore into her for a few seconds longer before he decides the conversation is finished and turns away. “Again tomorrow. You’re getting better, you know.”
She stands alone and silent and fumes while his footsteps echo in the vast space. She is unable to move even when the doors close behind him. Her lab awaits, safe and sterile and away from these nuisances, but his taunts ring in her ears.
Overwatch’s little angel, flying into battle, eh? Not satisfied with the glory she’s won off the battlefield, is she? Maybe an omnic will shoot her dead; it would be good riddance, except the world would make her into a martyr. So much younger than Moira but so much—so much—
She unloads the pistol’s simulated ammo into a training bot. A barbaric release of frustration, but it still feels good when it cries out and falls to the ground.
“How are you doing, Moira?”
She’s still fully dressed, but those eyes look at her like she’s naked as the day she was born. They look at her like they see exactly who she is, everything she’s ever thought and done. What an awesome thing, to be seen so completely.
It is, of course, just her imagination. Genetics, Moira’s own burden, lend Ana Amari’s eyes their particular focus. The tattoo certainly doesn’t hurt.
But after days on the training range with Reyes shouting down at her, and nights in the lab while her experiments fail, it feels good to indulge in the fantasy.
“I’m fine.”
“Just fine?” Ana crosses her legs and settles back in her chair. Moira’s chair, really, if she spent enough time in her tiny accommodations to consider the room hers. “Don’t be short with me.”
She could tell her about her real frustrations, about Reyes’ ludicrous demands, about the way the thought of Angela Ziegler rankles her. She could tell her so many more things, like what she’s done to herself and what’s been done to her and how she ended up here at all.
But she doesn’t tell her about any of that, because that is not their relationship, and that is not why she is here. Ana doesn’t want words from her, and she doesn’t want to let them go in the first place.
She wants Ana, perhaps, to know without her saying.
Confess.
“I’m fine, Captain Amari,” she says, and her tone is less brusque this time. She lowers her head in a show of deference she will not offer Reyes, has offered few others. But then, she doesn’t play this game with Reyes. This is for her and Ana only, a fantasy constructed for the two of them.
“Then what are you doing here?” Ana cups her hand in her chin and looks up at her.
“I want you—to punish me.” It comes out clipped and businesslike, easier than it has before. They both know why they’re there, and why drag out the unnecessary?
“Undress,” Ana orders.
Moira’s long fingers go first to the buttons of her white shirt, and she undoes them with the skill acquired from years of buttoning up and down. Then she reaches around to unstrap her plain white bra, and it falls to the floor as well. Her belt follows, and then her pants and socks and shoes.
She stands lanky and ill-proportioned and bony, her skin sallow like yogurt going bad and her veins underneath like greenish worms infesting her body. She is decomposing; she is a dead woman walking; it is only a matter of time, and the resource that seemed so abundant when she was twenty is slipping through her fingers now.
Ana places a warm finger on the dip of her stomach. She stands up and brings her finger with her, until her hand cups Moira’s face.
The warmth and the touch feel good, but they aren’t why Moira called her. The kiss, messy, is not why either, though she enjoys it when teeth dig hard into her lip and Ana begins sucking. When she breaks away, Moira’s mouth feels swollen and tingling.
“The bed,” Ana says, and she lightly shoves Moira away. “Bend over the edge. Don’t look behind you.”
Moira obeys. She stands with her arms braced on the duvet and her head hanging. She hears a rustling sound, and then Ana’s gentle footsteps as she moves toward her, and then the vicious and sudden snap of leather on leather.
Her belt.
“Count,” Ana says. That is the only warning Moira gets before the strike comes, catching her upper thighs. She spreads her legs in an instinctive invitation, but there will be no relief of that sort here and now.
“One.”
Again, on her buttocks this time. Ana does not hold back. She has a strong arm, and the lashes hurt. Moira’s skin is burning already.
“Two.”
Three and four come close after each other, and five catches her lower back. The welts will last days. Sitting will prove difficult. There is very little meat on her bones to absorb the shock.
Moira lets her eyes close. She counts out each number automatically, but she is no longer in the room with Ana. She is hovering somewhere dark and familiar. The pain is a welcome cocoon. It is the only thing there with her, and she lets it envelop her. She feels each strike acutely and lets the sting of it resonate through her. This is what she deserves, and how glorious to live, even just for a few vanishing minutes, in a world where people get what they deserve.
At twenty her whole body is throbbing and her arms are shaking, and when the twenty-first strike comes she does not count it as she has the others.
“I’m sorry!” she bursts out.
The twenty-second strike does not come. Instead Ana’s hands are warm and comforting on her back. Moira is unable to relax into the touch. Her whole body feels sore, not just the abused skin of her ass.
“I forgive you,” Ana says, still so conversational. She threads a hand through Moira’s short hair and scratches at her scalp like she’s petting an obedient dog. Moira dislikes the touch. She has finished what she came here for.
She turns and makes to drop to her knees, but Ana forestalls her with a gentle hand on her forearm.
“Not today.”
Moira is left unable to immediately respond to that; her first instinct is panic. Is Ana bored with her? Without reciprocity there will be no reason for her to come the next time Moira calls, and whatever she tells herself to stifle the disgust, she knows that there will be a next time.
“Not—?”
“Not today,” Ana repeats. She is still smiling. She is always inscrutable. How frustrating that would be, Moira imagines, if this were something more than it is. A reason not to want it to be more than it is.
Ana bends down and holds up Moira’s trousers. She steps into them, still reluctant. The cloth feels soothing on her tender skin. She hopes that sitting down will hurt for days. She wants to feel it as long as she possibly can, like as long as she’s in pain she’ll have an excuse for whatever monstrous things she does.
Ultimately Moira finds herself unable to contain the curiosity prickling at the edge of her mind. She’s most of the way dressed and doing the buttons on her shirt when the words spill from her tongue.
“Commander Reyes told me that you’re teaching Ziegler to shoot.”
Ana’s smile is replaced by surprise.
“Why do you mention that?”
Moira gropes about for an explanation that makes her sound less pitiful than she is.
“I thought she was too much of a pacifist to even let her hands be sullied by a gun.” She can’t stop herself from sneering.
“I think you two are similar,” Ana says.
“Please don’t insult me, Captain Amari,” Moira says with a dramatic roll of her eyes. Ana inclines her head in concession but can’t hide her smile.
“No insult intended.”
Her shirt is buttoned. Moira stretches her arms above her head. Time to return to the lab and the quagmire of uncertainty that awaits her there. She gestures toward the door, and Ana takes the hint, murmuring a farewell and leaving Moira alone in her room.
She slowly pulls on her socks and shoes. Her ass throbs. She tells herself her private joke, like she always does: maybe she hasn’t outgrown Catholicism after all.