Insanity.
To a five year old Emily Grey, it was just a word, one that rolled off her tongue with a taste somewhere between sugar and cyanide. It was game that played with her subconscious, whispered in hushed tones by her friends and family when no one knew she was listening. It was a late-night trip to a clinic and a physcologist twice a week, coupled with a top to bottom search of her room that yielded nothing.
By the time she was ten, the term crazy was not uncommon in the conversations that plagued her home, members of her immediate household no longer bothering to hide their concerns. Each phrase, each mental disorder they listed off stuck with her, filed away in the part of her mind that held every detail from every second of her early life.
At twelve, her eidetic memory put her three grades above her age level, laptop search history reflective of her intelligence. Her name elicited both fear and wonder from the other students, silence following her presence with a heavy aura. She was a fascination and an obsession and an inquiry all twined together as one, a catacomb of undetected atrocities.
When she was fourteen, she took a black sharpie marker and drew a line across her wall, labelling it one to ten before circling a two and stepping back with a smile on her face.
It took her sixteen years to graduate secondary, acceptance to a medical school already in line for her arrival. Physcopathy was brought along with it in the form of a pocket knife in her backpack and a scalpel through the waistband of her jeans, each blade carefully sterilized after each passing week.
She was a certified doctor by age twenty. The first time she watched someone die was mere months after that, having assisted in a surgery that didn't go quite as well as planned. The patient was a man in need of a heart transplant, who lost too much blood too fast to complete the operation. It was…endearing, for someone with her skill in the human sciences.
The first intentional kill she bore witness to was by her own hand. A man followed her from one side of the city to the other, taking a chance to pin her to a wall in the alley that lead to her rather shady apartment. Her hand found the tool attached to her belt and she put it through his throat without hesitation, sighing as his body crumpled on the stone floor. It took her just under twenty three minutes to dispose of the corpse (22:37, to be exact), using a carefully crafted lighter and a small vial of acid she'd kept in her handbag. She covered her tracks and disappeared without any indiction of what had happened.
That night, she drew a familiar line on the back of her bedroom door, carefully encircling the number eight.
At twenty seven, she was thrust full throttle into a civil war with nothing but a relocation order and a plane ticket to the capital. She'd collected several other 'incidents' since the first but had never been caught, a plethora of missing persons' articles in the papers that line her recycling bin. She'd considered herself more a of a scientist than a doctor by then, experimentation and information gathering being her most subjected field.
She was greeted by a gathering of armed guardians as she approached the gate, but she'd laughed them off. "Go home, children." Fell easily from her lips, a false cheeriness laced through the lifts in her voice. They'd insisted they 'defend' her anyways, shrugging off the chills that ran down their spines at the carefully placed sadistic smirk.
She was outfitted with armour of her own, white standard issue uniform decorated with medic-code purple along the edges. It flowed with her form perfectly, the weight on her shoulders bringing much more comfort with it than the greyscale blouse and skirt she'd first worn.
She climbed the ranks of their makeshift hospital with ease, watching in pleasure as the recruits started to develop a warily earned trust at her care. She didn't need to kill for her experiments this time around, having been given free reign of any fallen soldiers that the federation amassed. She'd managed to smuggle a felt marker into the lab, a calculated line surrounding the nine. her hand had hesitated over the ten, because insanity hadn't quite taken her yet.
Three years and half of the city's population loss later, she met Donald Doyle.
—
Personality clash is not something Doctor Grey tends to make herself familiar with, especially when even the army's hired mercenary wouldn't dare lift a finger against her. But as their fifth leader in counting is assassinated and the untrained secretary takes his place, well, that's a whole new story.
He's slow to the point and he can't determine the difference between war and massacre, mostly relying on the fact that everybody else has been in this business long enough to make this work. He stumbles around in the dark of his own incompetence, lost and looking for direction. He doesn't know where he's going or how he's going to get there and it makes Emily's blood boil.
Her profession is clear and pristine and it holds motive and finesse in equal regard, something he can't seem to comprehend. He talks too much, a living distraction with the single purpose of making her life hell. He's constantly hovering around the infirmary, asking question after question after goddamn question. His morals are strict but he doesn't know enough about the world to follow his codes, a personal facade of righteousness taking his refuge in his shadow.
Oh, and she's got shadows, more than he can possibly imagine despite their occasional presence in his own life. She's got darkness right down to a fine art, while he's just barely scratched the surface.
She hopes he takes a bullet so she can explore his stupid brain.
—
Doyle never really understood people until he met Emily Grey.
She was unlike anyone he'd ever met before, something strange hidden beneath the wide smile and the guarded eyes. She moves with the stealth and precision of an animal, something feline behind the way her feet dance silently across the concrete floor. She prefers to take her armour off while she works, something he notices from spending what could be considered a creepy amount of time near their hospital. She always has her hair tied up in a neat bun, each strand in its place. Her green irises glow in the reflected light from the city centre, florescent against her umber stained skin. She never wears shoes or gloves, yet somehow no blood touches her that he's seen. She's insistent that anyone being treated at least remover their helmet, she feels the need to see the face of the person she's working on, almost as if she's scared of forgetting they're people.
It's curious and captivating and enchanting, all at once.
She's the one that makes him start to think, to really try to decipher the codes of human nature. He finds solace in the fact even as everything starts to make sense she still remains a mystery, a locked room that could carry anything from paradise to poison behind it's iron doors.
And he does intend to find out, to know with absolute certainty whether underneath her mask she is a demon or an angel.
So what if he goes to hell for trying?
—
She notices.
No one else does, even with the lack of subtlety that paints his motions with a struggled air, the way his right arm stays pulled close to his body even though it's his dominant. The way his armour slants slightly to one side, resting heavy on uneven shoulders.
No one notices.
Except her.
She strides into his office late at night, pretending she doesn't see the way he jumps both at the door opening, then later at the realization that the presence is hers. She simply grins at his expression, murmuring soft nonsense to no one in particular as she takes him by the uninjured wrist and drags him down to the sick bay. She guides him into the room and sits him down on the cot closest to the door, scattering her attendance across the chamber to gather the plethora of tools she needs. The infirmary is empty save for the two of them, silence being the dominant sound apart from the soft colliding of metal from her tinkering.
She finishes her mission and sinks down onto the mattress so she's facing him, spreading the contraptions across the sheets between them before unclipping her helmet and pulling it over her head with a flourish. Dark curls fall around her shoulders, a few stray locks brushing up against her cheekbone. Doyle can't but start at the motion, flinching again as she raises a single eyebrow in contempt questioning. For a moment, nothing moves, tension running twice as thick as the atmosphere around them. Then, as if approaching a dangerous animal, she reaches a hand to press against the latch underneath his chin. He mirrors her earlier actions himself, fingers just barely brushing hers as he lifts the armour over his own skull.
A slight smirk pulls at her lips as she takes in his appearance, hair stuck up in any and all available directions. His hazel eyes meet hers, red spreading across the ivory skin of his face and neck as she studies him. She's bolder now he's let her near him once, unfastening the clasps that hold his chestplate in place with practiced ease. She pulls piece after piece of painted metal from his right side, never once looking up at his face as she completes the action. He feels oddly exposed as she takes the collar of his black under suit and tears a thin line across his chest, delicately peeling the material off his skin from his shoulder and down past his wrist, running her fingers along the line of the vein that starts at his palm and vanishes part way through his forearm. The touch sends shivers down his spine, and he struggles to maintain a composed air.
"You're not afraid of me." She says suddenly, breaking the amounted astriction with a simplicity that leaves Doyle fumbling with a response.
"Uh, okay?" He manages, watching as she simply smiles at his discomfort before digging her thumb into the space where his bicep meets the elbow joint. He lets out a sharp cry of surprise and pain, recoiling from the touch. She lets him pull away slightly but curls her fingers around his wrist to keep him within reach. He shoots her a look of absolute betrayal and she laughs, light and airy and full of genuine amusement so he can't help but relax.
Then she turns on him again, taking a syringe and driving it through the skin of his neck without hesitation. She presses against the plunger and springs back before he can even register what had happened.
He falls forwards, fog sinking almost instantly in his brain as he fumbles blearily with consciousness.
He nearly misses the soft "I'm sorry." she murmurs before the world goes dark.
—
"Doyle?"
Her voice is different, unlike the overly-cheerful 'I'm actually really creepy' type tone she usually uses. It's quiet but authentic, a hint of worry laced around the ends.
"Grey?" He slurs in response, blinking against the harsh light that fills his eyes as he struggles back to awareness. His head pounds, but that stays in the farthest reaches of his mind as the heat of her hand against his shoulder blocks out all other senses. Her skin is hot to the touch, sending his stomach careening in winding circles.
"You okay?" She asks, and all he can do is nod. He takes the way he can feel her stand as she pulls her arm back towards her form as a way of satisfaction.
"Time?" He inquires, gradually working his eyes up to the tolerance level needed for the reflections of light across the white walls.
"0700." She approximates. "You've been out for nine hours."
He makes a soft noise of acknowledgement, swinging his legs over the edge of the cot, his toes brushing against the cold floor. He moves to stretch out his arms but suddenly there's resistance, not in the form of pain but in plastic and cloth around the limb that was most definitely not there when she knocked him out.
"Um, Grey?" He calls. "What's this?"
A shadow falls over him and holy crap, how did she get over here that fast? She takes his hand from where it's hooked over the edge of the material and places it back at his side, and whether she doesn't notice or doesn't care that he reacts to her touch.
"Don't touch it." She commands. "You fractured a bone in your forearm and cracked one up in your elbow joint. And," She smirks. "If you even think of taking that off I'll make you regret it." And with that she spins on her heel and walks away, footsteps making no sound as her bare feet hit the stone beneath him.
He stares at his hands in his lap and can't stop himself from smiling.
—
Emily Grey is, by all definitions of the word, insane. She's physcotic and creepy and her moral guidelines are ambiguous at best, leaving her open to possibilities in the form of illegal activity that most people wouldn't dare even consider. She's absolutely out of her mind, and anyone who knows her won't hesitate to agree.
But even after all of that, the craziest thing she's ever done is fall in love.
She wouldn't say she's a stranger to romance, having been involved in several different 'arrangements' over the years, but she'd never engaged someone simply because she wanted to. Her heart never raced like it does this time, her stomach never did flip-flops in anyone else's presence.
She rubs the ink off the wall with bleach and a colour-faded cloth, re-tracing the numbers and the line with shaking hands. This time she circles the ten, thought racing through her mind that there's not enough numbers. She feels far too deranged than the fated two digit symbol could ever convey, even on a scale that demands exactly that.
Doctor Emily Grey is an absolute lunatic and all she can do about it is sink to the floor and hold her knees to her chest.
—
The first time they kiss, it's not planned by either party. It just kind of happens, and if either was asked they wouldn't be able to tell you who started it. Somehow the seconds between sitting cross-legged on opposite ends the infirmary mattress and the pressing of skin and lips remain unconnected, all they know is that it's happened and it doesn't matter who's idea it was because they were both tempted.
His fingers tangle in her hair, and her hands find his waist, and when they pull away it's because they need to breathe and if air was unneeded they would've stayed there forever.
He whispers her last name into the evening air, and all she responds with is "Call me Emily."
It's as simple as that.
—
Contrary to popular opinion, life is not a fairytale, and just because the feelings between Doyle and Emily are mutual doesn't mean they're taken without resistance. She doesn't approach the subject outside of occasional stolen moments in the dark and neither does he, because she's still got patients and he's still got soldiers and their duties keep them separate for all the time they could've used as a starting point for discussion. He becomes a better leader and he can't spend enough time around the sick bay as he wishes he could, even though he knows with absolute certainty that Doctor Emily Grey has been batshit crazy for years now.
He just doesn't care.
So they don't talk, and suddenly everything goes wrong and she gets a front row seat as their moronic mercenary decides he doesn't need their cause and up and leaves with his equally ridiculous boyfriend. She watches in frozen horror as grey and green and red paint the midnight sky, careless standoff raining gunfire on the confused marines below.
She takes a shot from a teleportation grenade with the rest of the colour-coded soldiers, because it's her job and damn right she's going to defend her society.
Even if it means she might not ever see him again.