Mercy lives in small moments between war-tattered dawn and nightmare dusk, in small bursts where her fingers alternate between gripping military issue, linen bedsheets and carding through dark hair. She is only thirty seven, and her body biologically even younger, but her mind weighs nearer to centuries, heavy with the tragedies she's seen and caused.
Perhaps the way she seeks solace in the cracks of other humans is not a healthy way to live, but she has always been a sucker for hurricane forces of nature made human - disasters just waiting to happen.
There exists no god in this war-worn land to judge her anymore anyway. She has already taken life and death into her own hands, what more is there left for any god to do? She mends flesh and bone with golden lining, pulsing from her hands, writes and rewrites her own history. She dons the armor of an angel, but bears the hands of a god. She has altered the very rules of life, lined her very existence with the seeds of immortality - there is no space left for any other god here.
And Mercy is, above all, a healer, a collector of broken things, mending them as they break. On the days where they start to blur together, and she thinks the depths of her doubts will swallow her whole, she remembers a series of old books that she read once upon a time in a dusty library, in her undergraduate years. She remembers the term kintsugi, remembers how it is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold dusted lacquer. And on bleak days like those, she fancies herself an artist, with her gold lined warriors and soldiers, each and every one of them bearing the delicate signature of her stitches in all places imaginable.
But seemingly more frequently, she is just so tired - the kind of tired that roils deep in the bone, cold and heavy - tired of living this life of endless running, being continually struck down only to get back up to heal and fight another day, and it is just so easy to lose yourself in another person.
She is twenty-something years old and lost in the tides of her research: the introduction of nanobiology into healthcare and modern medicine. Angela has been so busy her entire life: learning, striving, and working towards a better life - not for her, but for everyone else out there in the world. She has gone through multiple honors programs and had countless breakthroughs in research. She is twenty when they bestow upon her some honor of being chief surgeon, and she is lost ever since then.
She has no time to spare: there are lives on the line, every second of the day, she can feel the lives of the people weigh down upon her shoulders, every second wasted equivalent to another life gone.
This is how she finds herself nearer to her thirties than her early twenties, and still unmarried, unattached, and completely and utterly alone.
This is how Amélie finds her.
She is four years older, but half as experienced as Amélie when she waltzes into her life, with a jangling rush of bracelets, midnight hair, and cheekbones high and sharp enough to cut.
It is easy to fold herself into the space Amélie hollows out in her larger-than-life sort of way: all wild and untamed, a storm given flesh and a heartbeat. It's so easy to lose herself in the kind way her teeth flash pearly white, and her amber eyes shine, iridescent, in the afternoon sun. It's even easier to forget herself and the lives she has lost when Amélie burns a whisper of chérie into her skin late at night, in the creamy wash of moonlight, drowning together in a sea of sheets and skin.
In the golden haze of Overwatch's glory days, Angela has the opportunity to learn Amélie in breaths and heartbeats, in stolen moments and snatches of borrowed time - borrowed time being the brief interludes between research and Gérard. It is a selfish thing, to wear Amélie's passion like a second skin while her boyfriend - nay, husband - lives and breathes several doors down the hall, but it does not stop her from worshipping the lines and arches of her back, and promising empires in her name.
You must really like me, Amélie teases one day, flushed and out of breath, as Angela crawls back up her body. She only hums in response.
But of course, nothing gold can stay, so when she's gone back to her husband, it will come as no surprise to Angela. Even the most perfect storm will pass, and life makes Amélie pass her by.
Sometimes, Widowmaker breathes this same line to her in the heat of battle, sultry and heavy with broken promises, and Mercy has to take a deep breath before backing away from the razor sharp smile sent her way.
She ventures with a couple others this way, all of them different, and yet always the same: tragedy in the lines of their palms, hair dark, with the taste of disaster sharp across her tongue: beautiful and empty beasts.
Fareeha is different - dark hair and darker eyes, a force of nature in her own right. But somehow, she stays.
She is different because she doesn't have any sort of easy charm - no, far from it. She is unyielding, and stoic, with a dry sense of humor (and perhaps, that is a sort of charm in and of itself).
It is bitterly slow, getting to know her, not at all like the whirlwinds she had engaged herself with previously. Fareeha is an intensely private person, and getting even the least bit of information requires its own special kind of prying. But each morsel offered up is a treasure in its own right, and only serves to encourage. Fareeha reminds Angela of Ana Amari, with her sharp features and even sharper sense of justice.
So maybe it is the allure of feeling young all over again, even if her research has not allowed her body to biologically age anywhere over the mark of twenty five years - because while her body is young, her mind feels impossibly old. Being with Fareeha feels similar to the way that Widowmaker offers an insight back into glory days past, youth abound, but without the regret and the what if.
It is novel, and it is new, even if her sad stories are nothing of the sort to Angela at this point - she has heard them all. She has taken her fair share of tragedies and trainwrecks, and nothing is a surprise anymore.
Although the bitter and longing way Fareeha quips about her mother will always be a point of interest for her, this particular tune, perhaps, she has never heard.
But if getting to know her is bitterly slow, falling into the physical portion of it is impossibly slower. Angela has always been a very physical person - touch is a constant with her, and it is by no means hard for her to show her affection in anyways possible. Fareeha does not budge, no matter how hard she pushes, does not respond to her friendly and slightly-less-friendly touches in either positive or negative fashion, and eventually, Angela comes to accept the fact that she has to wait for Fareeha to come to her.
It's on the most unexpected of days.
Right after a crushing loss, with the opposing side somehow managing to stop her from effectively supporting her team, Angela patches up everyone after the skirmish wearily and doesn't notice keen eyes watching her as she moves from patient to patient. It's an off day for her. And after she's sure she's sent everyone to bed, she makes her way over to the lounge well after midnight, keeps the lights off, curls up, knees to chest, white-golden hair in disarray, and veins teeming with nanobots trying to repair the damage done to her system today. She lets the weak moonlight filtering in keep her company, and ignores the aches of her body - it is only chemicals in her brain telling her she is hurt, nothing more than a small reaction, the likes of which she has bottled up in vials and beakers all around her lab.
She distills life and death and pain, stoppers them up in little test tubes - there is no magic to life or death here anymore.
She is so lost in thought she barely notices the soft padding of feet against metal and the sudden solid presence pressing up next to her. What she does notice is the humming and the weak heartbeat next to her, a far cry from the utter stillness of her own form.
They sit in silence for a long while, breathing shallowly, until Fareeha simply scoops her up easily and carries her back to her room. She sits her back down so gently that the bedsprings barely creak in response, and waits for another long minute, until she pulls her closer. Angela isn't sure who eventually made the final move, whether it was her pressing ever closer, hungry for affection, or if it was Fareeha, purposeful in her movements, drawing her closer, or if they just met halfway - either way, when she finally closes the distance between them and crushes their frames together, it was like she had finally broken the surface after swimming upwards for ages. She breathes her in, pulls herself closer until she's light-headed from such proximity.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Well, she supposes that it's history if history is the dips of Fareeha's hipbones, the curve of her thighs, and the delicate blue webbing of veins on the insides of her wrists.
It is on days like these that Angela has to remind herself that she is an artist, with her broken, golden army - but she finds that she doesn't need to. Fareeha is art underneath her fingertips, living and moving and breathing, but infinitely more beautiful than any renaissance piece. Angela runs her kisses down the lines of her body that catch the vanilla shafts of twilight filtering through the windows. She commits this to memory - catalogues and stores it away for the years to come, this one incandescent moment that they were allowed to exist in synchronized harmony.
She could not, for the life of her, tell you where she started or ended, or which breath was hers - and couldn't even begin to discern where her fingerprints melded into the chemistry of her skin. Life had not made Fareeha Amari pass her by, and in this one moment, crashing down and climbing ever higher up all at once, Angela sends out her first whispered prayer to a god she has long since thought abandoned them. Oh, my god, please-
And perhaps, just a little bit of life's previous magic was returned.
Ultimately, Fareeha is the unmovable object that reminds her she cannot possibly be an unstoppable force, a very human reminder than she does not have to be Atlas with the weight of the Earth upon his shoulders. Mercy becomes just another pretty promise wrapped in a pair of golden wings, shunted to the back of her mind.
An anchor that says it is okay to love and be loved.
You are human.
You are glorious.
You are alive.
Metaphorically, Mercy's heart begins to beat, anew.