"Well, hello, Genji."
The good doctor smiled. The corners of her lips, coaxed gently into a travesty. A subtle sort of affair that did not reach her eyes.
"Angela," a nervous wringing of hands coated with metal, ash on his tongue as he swallowed, mind sent to a dizzying purgatory. "I realize you're angry."
"Angry?" She tilted her head, blonde wisps suspended over lips like wire. A finger to those coaxed corners, delicate and insincere. "What reason would I have to be angry."
He winced. The lack of trailing upwards inflection did not escape him.
"Angela," he tried again, palms toward her in a placating gesture. "I may not be your favorite person right now, but you must understand – "
"But whyever would you not be my favorite person?" she drawled, the venom rolling sweetly from her tongue. "Enlighten me."
"If we must play this childish game – " Genji's pupils curled in exasperation from behind his mask.
"You want to know what's childish, Genji?" she said quietly.
Her voice – silvery and smooth, silk against his ears – reached dangerous simmers.
"What's childish," she trembled, nails bunching the fabric of her shirt. "Is the belief that your life belongs only to you. The only game in question is the one with which you're gambling your existence away. For…for what?"
Her breath hitched, a brief sharp whine of delirious anger.
"A cheap thrill."
He bristled, ready to nip this unjust slight in the bud.
"Our missions hardly serve as my personal thrills. Everything we do, we do to make the world even the slightest bit less of a cesspool than it currently is. You know that. Do you think I enjoy risking life and limb on a daily basis?"
"Could've fooled me!" she shrieked.
"Your vendetta's over, Genji! The Shimadas are dust in the wind, our mission – " she almost sneered amidst her hysterics. "is one that's supposed to bring peace! But your goal yesterday wasn't peace. You were not a man acting in deliberation. Everything to you was debris, you wanted war – "
A sob wracked her posture, and she stumbled.
"That isn't your business – " he started, fingers of steel falling limp in exasperation.
"How can you even say that – "
"The way I go about the tasks set for me is my prerogative – "
"Your way of going about it was reckless, imbecilic, shortsighted; reminds me of the hotheaded, irresponsible playboy that romped around those years ago like an idiot – "
"Angela, seriously, what is your problem – "
"My problem is you almost DIED, Genji!"
Eyes blistering, cheeks burning, a river of tears staining her front, Mercy succeeded in stunning Genji into silence.
"You almost died," she whispered, a ghost in every curve of her tongue.
"Angela…"
"You dove into that gunfire without a second thought to your own safety and it could've cut you to bloody ribbons and the fact it didn't was a damn miracle."
A beat of quiet. Two, three, four. The air palpable and heavy, interrupted only by Mercy's smothered sobs.
"The moment I saved your life, all that time ago," she sniffed. "It stopped being just yours. The fact that you don't get that is what hurts the most."
He nearly retreated from the room, faintly aware of the acute whirring of some mechanism or other in the blurry distance. Faced with the implications of something so daunting as the weight of Mercy's words, even his knees – sleek, brimming with technology, beautiful deadly curvature of soldered titanium – buckled.
"Just because my recovery ended up as your greatest success story," he attempted weakly, blurting in tandem with his mind's desperate scrabble for purchase. "I'm not some tr-trophy you can put on display – "
"Unless you really are as goddamned dense as the metal you're wearing," she seethed, cheeks blotched crimson with ill-concealed vehemence. "Then you know that's not what I mean."
The halls adjacent to the room rang cold and hollow. The suit that she painstakingly crafted for him, her magnum opus – as if an artist's loving gesture, as if carved from the finest of marble – had never afforded him feeling, but now the tips of his fingers throbbed, now his joints ached with something insurmountable, something his body yearned for, forever beyond his reach, his heart encased in a drum of metal, a furnace and glacier all at once –
"You can't really think…" he trailed off, mumbling.
"Genji," she mustered, her throat a curtain of velvet even as tears dripped freely. "I won't allow it. Even if it's you yourself. I won't forgive anyone who devalues what you are to the world. To me."
She stepped softly towards him.
"I've put so much into keeping this beating," she murmured, her slender fingers brushing idly over his left breastplate. "Into making sure no one's left with any doubt you're alive. You are, Genji. I'd die myself before that's ever in question."
His façade turned skyward, his eyes peering listlessly at the dim, flickering ceiling lights through the slits. One arm tentatively resting across her shoulders.
"…Okay," he surrendered. "Okay. I'm sorry, Angela."
She sighed, propping her chin on his shoulder, not minding the bite of metallic chill. Her cheek pressed firmly against his. Warmth steeped where there was once cold.
"Maybe we're trying to save the world, Genji, I don't know."
Petite arms winding about his waist, holding him close. Seizing him as if he were something fleeting in a blizzard. A sheet of paper flimsy as the breeze. As ephemeral as a heartbeat.
"All I do know is you mean the world to me."
Author's Note:
Here, have some of my Overwatch trash while I work on my other fics.
I like these two, they're cute. Their surroundings are left purposely vague, because I felt that the less detail, the more significant their interaction. Uh, I hope I didn't just botch it.
Let me know what you thought!