The Art of Thinking
By Shigan
Edit: Cyn
"The art of thinking is the greatest art of all, for 'as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.' The thinker knows he is today where his thoughts have taken him and that he is building his future by the quality of the thoughts he thinks."
-Wilferd Peterson
..
The first time Angela heard of the name Moira O'Deorain was when her professor gave her a copy of The European Journal of Human Genetics. The man was humouring the genius girl who was doing way to many classes and kept talking about applied nano engineering for a research thesis. She flipped through it between lectures. A publication followed by the commentary by a young post-doc student caught her eyes. It was an interesting read, matched with a funny sounding name.
..
Angela sighed in exasperation at her desk. The formula in front of her made no sense. The numbers were right, the system was right, she was simply to sleepy and raw to makes sense of the logic. She was also getting slightly hungry. She peeked out from window and noticed the large, heady snowflakes that rolled in the wind. The other children in the orphanage were playing in the yard, making snow angels and some younger boys were tossing snowballs around under the supervision of a matron. The groundskeeper had decorated one of the apple trees in christmas lights, giving the whole garden a translucent, dreamy glow.
It was a nice sight, she supposed, but so noisy. The narrow, shoebox like room they had put all her belongings in while she was gone didn't exactly make it better. She missed her attic room at the university campus already. At least there, everyone was an grown up (except for her!), it was quiet during study hours and she had all the privacy she wanted. No kids running around and into each others' rooms at bedtime and no nightly crying from new arrivals.
Still, it was comforting to return here for the holidays. Her matron had always treated her kindly and the government would probably send someone to be santa for the younger kids. Some organization would donate enough money for them to receive gifts and everyone would help to prepare a big dinner on christmas day. It was homey, or as close to home as she could remember. And it was nice to have this, at least. She would be able to return for another three years until she was to old to be cared for. A sting of worry flashed at the thought of the day she would have to pack her things and leave the orphanage for good, but she pushed it away.
Closing her books, she stretched, satisfied with the numerous pops she heard and laid back on her bed. The sheets smelled strongly of the generic soap they used for everything, tang and clean. She brought up her old holo and opened the newsfeed, selecting a article about Overwatch and their most recent aid mission.
..
Moira first heard of the name Angela Ziegler by the coffee machine at her lab. Some old, stubborn fool was gesticulating about the rashness of today's youth and the importance of adhering to professional traditions in research. Calling out a bunch of young researchers by name, and making his distaste for them quite clear. She thought it horseshit, from a colleague as thick as two planks with ideas as interesting as a lump in a bog.
She waved it off, refilled her coffee and left. Months later, she would remember the name when it would be highlighted in both scientific and mainstream news outlets, hauling Overwatch the patrons of a new era in medical science.
..
Unreviewable. Questionable Ethical Implications. Outrageous methodology.
Rejected.
The words burned in Moira's mind. She read the mail again, just to confirm that it was in fact what it said, then closed the lid to the computer. She felt hollow, as if all air had left her. All these years of hard, patient work and nights spent going where no mind before her had dared to go, all these weeks of waiting and polite cajoling to play by their rules, all for nothing. This journal had been her best hope, the rest of publishers would not dare to go against their decision.
She would not be published, just another dead voice in the scientific cosmos.
They had killed her where it mattered the most. No one would be able to read her work and build upon her ideas, no symposiums would be held to discuss how her discoveries would further the study of genetics, and no students would find her efforts interesting enough to continue upon because they would never be exposed to them. She had never been one to clamor or long for fame, but always believed at least the value of what she had accomplished would speak for itself. She had opened the doors to countless possibilities and surely they would be able to see it. The infantile stupidity of the ethical board was unbelievable. Great things should not be hindered by the tedium of details and limited by the pettiness of inferior minds, progress should not.
Not so, apparently.
For the first time in her life, Moira O'Deorain didn't know what to feel which had always been a bad thing for her. She had never been one to anger recklessly, even as a child. No, anger had never been the problem, but what filled up the hollowness when the anger was gone.
..
They met personally for the first time under rather dramatic circumstances. A Blackwatch mission gone awry had sent the esteemed Dr. Ziegler to their headquarters in flight at the personal request of commander Reyes. Dr. O'Deorain had been requested to assist due to a shortage of medical staff.
Moira had been in the locker room pulling on the detestable green surgery scrubs when Angela threw herself into the room, rattling the door at the hinges by sheer force. The blonde looked like she had ran all the way from the parking lot. Red-faced and gasping after breath, she gave curt greeting before literallytossing her clothes off with one hand, while simultaneously pulling on green garbs with the other. A flash of blue underclothes and a pale scar across a shoulder blade passed by. The woman even still kept walking. Moira was still halfway into her pants and staring at the storming display of practiced routine, discipline and sheer beauty when Angela was already finished and had moved to the next door.
Angela looked back at the taller woman beside the lockers, sizing her up from top to toe with a glance. A quick smile flashed past her face before the surgical mask went on.
"New to the green, Doctor?" She asked, almost cheekily as if someone wasn't dying outside.
Moira sighed, rolled her eyes and pulled her pants up. Surgeons.
..
It really was like a dance.
Moira watched Angela work from beyond the sterility of the protective window. She found no more fitting way describe the younger woman's flow through the steps of surgery, like a well-drilled soldier. Or a practiced dancer. The agent had taken a bullet to the chest which penetrated straight through his lung, shattering two ribs and tore off parts of his shoulder blade on the way. The field medics had restarted his heart twice on the evac shuttle back. She could barely see the Blackwatch emblem through the darkening layers of blood and gore. Angela had been notified before they touched down and the rest had been standard procedure.
It was like watching water course from high to low. Natural, powerful, mesmerizing; as if stolen away from the white labs and tedious meetings of Overwatch was where Angela Ziegler could truly be in her element. Moira could see why the woman was respected amidst the medical community. At barely half the age of her professional peers, the woman was fastly mastering the skill and composure that usually took a lifetime to achieve, if ever done so. Paired with mind-boggling research proposals and the cleverly patented valkyrie suit, it was understandable why she arose interest wherever she went.
Like her own, she thought. Moira was unsure of how to label her curiosity towards the younger doctor. It wasn't like her to take unnecessary interest in her coworkers at all. Despite this, the geneticist found herself wish for further… interaction, and perhaps exchange of ideas. Their opportunities were so boringly rare due to work.
Or that was what she told herself.
Something happened in the operation theatre. One of the nurses looked up and pointed out something blinking on a machine. Moira couldn't see anything but Angela's eyes through the glass, but watched as the younger woman begun to reach out in quick, precise staccato where the nurses were doing their best to keep up with the tools she asked for. More nurses rushed into the room with bags of blood and other liquids as things picked up around the center bed. Another doctor pushed a large machine into the room and began to set it up.
It was a chaotic scene to her untrained eye. Nerve wrecking really with all that motion and a rapidly declining patient growing paler by the second. Angela however barely seemed to notice. She worked on, steady as a mountain and swift like the wind breezing over silent waters.
..
Moira caught up with Angela in the hallway outside the surgery ward. The blonde was leaned up against the wall with a coffee in hand while browsing through a data pad.
"My condolences, Dr. Ziegler." She said sincerely.
Angela looked up at her in surprise, then shook her head in tired defeat.
"I didn't know him. He was one of yours, through and thorough. Never set a foot inside Overwatch." She replied. The words were clinical, as if they were spoken by someone used to violent death.
"Nonetheless, you did what you could. It was merely his time."
The blonde gave the words a moment of consideration and nodded. "I did. I went over things in my head and wouldn't have done anything differently. Still sucks though."
"Would you like me to rely the news to commander Reyes?" She asked out of politeness.
Angela blinked. "That's how you guys do things here? No, I'll talk to Gabe myself. My surgery? My words."
"Very well. I can't say I envy you for having to report to both commanders though." Moira made a grimace at the very thought of Morrison's overbearing demands of military decorum. "I've only had the pleasure myself a few times. It was… a process."
The blonde chuckled humorlessly at the mention of the commanders and the somewhat conflicting ideologies they had gotten used to working with. They both stood quietly for a moment while Moira pondered for more things to say, talking to the surgery folks had always been like squeezing water from stone for her. Angela seemed to notice her discomfort.
"Thanks for your concern, though. This happens, trust me. The surgery was a success but the patient died. I don't think I'll ever get used to that particular irony." Angela said with a wry smile.
"It's hard to find another form of humour fitting to accompany death, however." Moira mused.
"Not everyone appreciates it with humour at all."
"There's hardly a point to make it more gloomy than the subject gives us cause for, however. I shall start the paperwork to notify his next of kin, if he had any. I can spare you that at least."
Angela nodded at her words, then took another large sip before properly meeting Moira eye to eye. She dropped the datapad to a table and stood up to her full height, which compared to the redhead wasn't very tall at all. Angela strained her neck and chuckled at the difference, but looked to Moira for the first time in a different light.
"Thank you, that would help a lot." She said softly. "Also, how do you take your coffee, Dr. O'Deorain?"
..
Angela watched Moira work with the inquisitive nature of a child.
She sat at the side table, browsing through a book the size of a tombstone while occasionally asking questions. Her eyes darted quickly between the lines of the text and the redhead as she followed Moira's moves with an hawkish attention to details. It was almost like having a student in her lab, except this one didn't muck up her sensitive instruments or ask dumb, reviseable questions. The few questions she did receive were punctually relevant and left her considerably baffled at the odd angles the woman's mind would take. It was a stark reminder that Angela had taken a dive or two into genetics herself, and proved to be a strong debater regarding the current state of the field.
Most remarkable of all however, was Angela's growing presence in the Blackwatch laboratory. She would drop by, sometimes to say hi after surgeries, but most of the times for seemingly no reason at all. Their conversations ranging from their work to theoretical science to details from their daily lives, and when they talked Moira thought Angela's face would lit up in elation. Words of excitement and reserved joy sprinkling through a professional persona hiding the fiercely intelligent woman underneath.
It was attractive; maddeningly, infuriatingly and undeniably so.
For the first time, Moira did not find her own physiological response to a woman a distracting hindrance. She revelled in the sense of life the blonde would bring to the room during visits and often found herself looking forward to the next occasion. Had it been anyone else, it would almost have been suspicious.
She jokingly asked Angela if she was there to whisk away her research.
"They say communication is the basis of all research, after all." She stated.
"Thinking is the basis of all research." Angela merely pursed her lips in slight irritation. "And you're pretty good at it."
"I didn't mean to imply- " She started but was interrupted by Angela holding up a hand.
"Sometimes, Moira, we talk to people because we enjoy talking to them."
They stood side by side then, in lab coats and with the room reeking of chemical solutions, and Moira barely noticed that Angela's hand had briefly touched hers.
..
Moira rarely showed extreme emotions like love or hate. Most things merely didn't merit her attention in their mundane boredom. Things like weather, family, friends and the arrival of new children were necessary topics to pass time with colleagues and collaborators. It was a polite decorum she knew to abide and respect, just like listening to what people liked or disliked. She rarely assigned any personal preferences to details like such.
When she saw Angela call out in joy and run into the arms of Fareeha Amari however, she suddenly found a hundred reasons to dislike the young egyptian.
Fareeha was on leave from officer school and looked like the stereotypical soldier returning from duty, radiant, proud and smiling in a crisp uniform. She picked Angela up and spun her in a circle, both laughing like children and talking in excited tones. Ana joined them soon after.
It was like looking into a family portrait where she would never belong.
..
Moira walked into the Watchpoint lounge, unaware of the flying hardcover magazine aimed straight for her head.
Superior height, quick reflexes and some luck saved her however as she threw up her right hand just in time to deflect the offending projectile. She let out a sound in surprise, and flinched at the pain as hard edges cut against old scar tissue. The folder she had been carrying clattered to the floor, together with her holopad and what was left of a ham sandwich.
"You have some nerve!"
Moira looked up from her pile of belongings and was met with the enraged but nonetheless beautiful view of one Angela Ziegler in the green surgery scrubs. Her ponytail was a mess and a surgery mask dangled unattractively from her neck. The geneticist swallowed. She hadn't expected to be discovered until dinner at least.
"Explain yourself!" Angela demanded, somehow managing to yell without actually raising her voice.
"My report is rather self-explanatory." She replied dully.
"You suggested we surpass an ethical review board by keeping the research within Blackwatch operations. Are you insane?!"
"I've mentioned this before. I was not joking when I said so. You know how those people work. They wouldn't be able to see the value of these results if it so hit them in the face. Their minds so fettered by traditions and the need to remind everyone of the importance of their own positions." She retorted, her last words literally dripping of contempt.
"And even so, if this gets out we lose all credibility! I can't believe you would ever suggest such a thing to the commanders."
"And why not? We have the skill and technical opportunity to advance now, Angela. Not next year or even next month. Now. You've run the numbers and I've done the simulations. You know this will work."
"It will be unusable if completed like this! How are you even going to get the approval for doing human trials if we skip what you are suggesting, unless you think that part is too mundane to be bothered with?" Angela asked, she strode up to Moira and shoved a finger straight into her sternum. "These formalities exist for a reason, you know they do! You took the same oath as I did. We do not play God. How can you not see that this is just wrong?"
"Ah. And who decides the nature of what is wrong exactly? Who rose up and made those boards the rulers of what should or should not be possible to achieve by, yes, thinking? By what power do their petty, limited minds have the right to put restraints on people like us, I wonder?" Moira could hear the irate droll of her own voice. "We can bring change to all of this, but instead you want to play childishly nice. We finally have the opportunity to make true advancement for the first time in decades, and you want to deny us this progress by abiding by rules you know are dreary, obsolete relics from an age we considered organ transplantation a remarkable feat. Is the course I seek truly so terrible compared to the stagnation and death that is yours?"
"We do not have the right!"
"Then who does!?" Moira blurted out in a display of frustration, surprising even herself.
The blonde's face was flushed beyond anger at this point.
"You-!" Angela near whispered, her lips drawn in thin lines as her other hand gripped Moira's lab coat. There were lightning in her eyes and were dangerously close.
"Yes?"
In a brief moment of insanity, Moira considered kissing Angela. She wondered how it would feel, to truly feel the younger woman against her riled up in all her furious glory. To comb her fingers through blonde locks of hair and cradle herself against pale arms and hot lips, and just be what her body wanted her to.
It turned out that she didn't have to. Delicate hands suddenly reached out, gripped her cheeks and pulled her in. She barely had time to ponder the implications of soft brushes of fingers along her neck before Angela reached up and pressed their lips together. It started off hard, built on the rise of rolling emotions from their argument but soon ebbed into a slow series of tender caress. Moira raked a hand along Angela's lower back and was awarded by a small gasp as the eager length of the other's body pressed into her. The blonde angled her head to kiss her deeper as time passed and breaths closed.
When they stopped Angela remained within her arms with her forehead resting against the older woman's chest. None of them knew what to say or what to do. Moira thanked the higher powers for no one walking in on them.
"... I'm so angry with you." Angela muttered at last. "I know I can't stop you, but I won't help you either."
Moira said nothing. She kept her arms around the smaller woman, wondering if her heart had ever beaten so fast, or air ever tasted so sweet.
"I won't use your name in any of it." She replied, not sure if that was the right thing to say.
"That doesn't make it right. It doesn't change anything."
The geneticist thought of her own rejection from the medical community; of the grubby, small men and women who held the powers to make or unmake a scientific career by the whims of cultural propriety. The cowards and simpletons who simply accepted the words of those with fancier titles, and the sycophants chasing prestige rather than dedicate a modicum of effort to science. She thought of the young, bright mind she now held in her arms, the excellence Angela with certainty would reach, and the precious art of thinking she so effortlessly mastered.
"No, but it matters to me." Moira murmured into the softness of Angela's hair.
..
It was a late afternoon at the end of summer. The tree tops had just begun to turn colours but the heat still lingered. The Watchpoint was eerily quiet as of late, people were anxious and the hushed conversations in the hallway grew direr by the day. Neither Reyes nor Morrison had been seen for a week.
Moira had finished the last of her packing and sat by the cliffs, simply enjoying the view of viridian waters below and feeling at peace with another chapter of her life coming to a close. Her work at the Oasis Institute of Genetics didn't start in another few days. There was nothing to do aside from having another cup of the dreadful coffee and revise.
The sound of footsteps approached, a familiar figure sat down beside her.
"You're done?" Angela asked. She simply nodded.
They were quiet for awhile, each lost to their own thoughts. The moment was to quiet and the sunlight to nice for them to find any real meaning in chatter.
"When do you leave for the hearing?" Moira inquired back. She did not envy the other woman. Appearing before the UN would be an ordeal few of the agents had to contain with, especially considering Angela would more or less be witnessing against her commander. Morrison was an uptight stick even during the best of his days, but she knew the younger woman admired him.
"Tomorrow lunch." Angela grimaced. "You?"
"The equipment will ship tonight. I still have some time to myself."
"I wish- " Angela started but stopped before she could finish. She looked as pristine as ever, blonde hair trim and her back straight, but now there was a hint of uncertainty in her face. A fear for the unknown that was soon to come. The young doctor shook her head in a deep sigh and leaned over, coming to a rest gently against the other's shoulder. Moira gathered the hand that brushed hers and cradled it, caressing this sweet extension of Angela's person and hoped the younger woman would understand.
"I shall think of you, often." She said, warmed by the sun and the presence of her companion.
None of them possessed the right words, just like none of them would ever have the heart to stop the other in wherever they choose to endeavor. It was perhaps for the best, she thought. They were not made like that, and at the moment it was all the support either of them needed.
*fin*