Gabriel raised a hand, pausing centimeters away from knocking, his thoughts churning. This wasn't a visit he wanted to make by any means; he knew full well what this was about, and he also knew that once he started down this shady path, there might not be any going back. You hired her, the other part of himself argued. Are you going to use her to help yourself or not? You're not getting any better on your own…
He rapped his knuckles against the door, which obligingly opened to reveal the tall, slight redhead.
"Mr. Reyes. Do come in." She stepped aside, gesturing to her lab. He looked around. Clean glassware gleamed on the dustless countertops, unidentifiable machinery dotted like white icebergs in a sea of glass and steel. Only one surface was completely cleared, and that was the long metal table in the middle of the room.
"I noticed you were acting…off…during my lessons. Are you feeling all right?" She asked, peering intently at him.
"Yeah…just sometimes I get dizzy spells." He grunted, rubbing the back of his neck.
"Is this related to your condition?"
He shrugged. "Dunno."
"Have they been getting worse?"
"Yeah, I'd say so."
"Headaches?" She asked, retrieving a pen and clipboard and beginning to take notes.
He nodded.
"How are you sleeping?"
He squinted at her.
She raised an eyebrow. "Well?"
"Uh…I haven't really been."
"Drinking a lot of coffee?"
"I kinda have to."
"If you haven't been drinking more water than usual, then it's likely you're dehydrated. I don't currently have the tools to deal with that, so you'll have to see someone else for that." She held out a hand. "Your records, please."
He passed his records over to her, and her attention turned to the papers. She thumbed through them, combing carefully over the information, then suddenly closed a hand on them, crumpling them. "This is slightly better than useless to me," she said, tossing the records onto a counter. "Who did these tests?"
"Angela Ziegler. What's wrong with them?"
She snorted. "Of course. Smart woman. Good doctor. Terrible scientist."
Gabriel bristled, his eyes glimmering with anger. "She's been patching us up for years now. How is she "terrible", exactly?"
"She has no record of which of your gene segments specifically are affected by this genetic damage, and she has no plan to attempt to repair them."
He frowned. "She told me she was working on it."
Again Moira raised a thin eyebrow. "Oh really? What exactly has she proposed to do about your condition?"
Gabriel thought for a moment. "She didn't say," he admitted. "But she has been doing a lot of research."
"I'm sure she has," O'Deorain said, her tone slightly sarcastic. She carefully smoothed back a lock of hair that was slipping out of place. "And you still sought my assistance."
"I need answers."
"So do I, if I'm to help you. Will you let me examine you and form my own conclusions? The sooner I have data, the sooner we can find a cure, a real cure, to your problem."
He sighed. Saying no was only putting off the inevitable. "Fine."
She smiled and gestured to the steel lab bench. "Shall we?"
The sound of running water reached his ears as he sat down on the table; she was washing her hands. He grimaced. Great. Her cold hands would be even colder.
"So is this the bit where you take a DNA sample and try to figure out how to turn me into a lizard?" He asked, only half-joking.
Moira smiled faintly. "Mr. Reyes, despite whatever you may think of me, do try to keep in mind I am a fully-qualified doctor, and contrary to my infamous record, your best interest is my best interest, as I have told all my previous patients. I know what I'm doing."
And there it was. The inevitable truth. He'd read her file; most of the complaints from Moira's detractors ran along the lines of improperly-tested treatments and the possible threat they posed as opposed to patient records of harm Moira had done. Moira was a doctor, a damn good one, and seeing as how he'd brushed off Angela's help as inadequate, he had to make a wild leap of faith that she wasn't going to perform some test on him that transformed him into a sentient pile of sludge.
She turned to him. "Take your shirt off."
He made a face of disgust but did as she asked, glancing back at her as she circled behind him. He could feel her gaze raking over him, taking him in. A shiver that had nothing to do with the cold-induced goosebumps rising on his arms shook him.
"It is a bit cold in here, Mr. Reyes. I'm sorry. I'll try to be quick."
"It's not the cold," he said, only a half-lie.
Then I'm the problem?" She asked. Her fingers-just as he expected; freezing-settled on his shoulders. The talons on her right hand tapped against his collarbone and pectoral muscles, a subtle reminder of what she had, at some point, done to herself. But her touch was remarkably gentle. "Is the thought of coming to me for help so abhorrent, even though I am a fully-qualified doctor?"
"I didn't mean-"
She cut him off, her lilting voice chiding but gentle. "Of course you didn't mean that. You fear the unknown, a natural reaction. But you are under no obligation to stay if you're uncomfortable."
He pinched the bridge of his nose, feeling like a fool. He wasn't a child; she shouldn't have to talk to him like one. "Look, let's just get this over with, okay?"
"Certainly, Mr. Reyes."
She picked up something from her collection of tools and returned with a blood pressure cuff. He tried to put his mind elsewhere as she checked his blood pressure and pupils, his reflexes, his heart rate, his breathing, far too interested in the process of examining him to make small talk like Angela did. Far too interested in examining him period, he thought. He felt less like a human being under her gaze than an insect under a microscope. His mind flitted back to her past and the lab animals she had surely used at one point, wondering if she analyzed test animals in the exact same way she was now examining him. Was there even a distinction in her mind?
Fuck off, he snapped at the thought. You're being paranoid.
"We're almost finished," she told him, pulling the stethoscope from her ears. She tapped the table with her daggerlike nails. "Lay down for me, please."
He grimaced again. At least she was polite, he thought, as he lowered himself flat onto the block of ice that passed as her lab table. To his surprise, she caught his head to keep him from banging it on the metal, her mismatched eyes peering into his own, a slight smile lingering around the corners of her mouth. He folded his arms defensively across his chest, his whole body tensing slightly.
"Relax, Mr. Reyes. You don't think I'd hurt my commander, do you?"
He broke eye contact. She had a point. If Overwatch found out O'Deorain was using their members as lab rats, she'd be tossed out on her ass faster than he could say science. And likely thrown into jail, to boot. All he'd have to do was report her, and his superiors would listen. She had to know that; the stipulations regarding misconduct were by no means subtle, and she didn't strike him as the kind of person that only gave cursory glances at her contracts. He knew she'd joined Overwatch for funding, and he was pretty sure she wouldn't risk it all for a few experiments she might manage rope him into using his situation as leverage. At least, not yet.
Her cold hands pressed against his gut, making him jump a little at the contact. He glanced down. She glanced back at him.
"Pain?" She asked.
"No," he responded. She continued her exploration. He could 't help but feel a little amazed at the delicacy she displayed; she hadn't scratched him once, not even with her talons.
"Feelings?" She queried.
"Bored. Uncomfortable. Mind buzzing with other things I could be doing."
"But those other things all fall apart if your health is not taken into account. Expediency when it comes to one's health is a dangerous thing," she told him softly.
"Like the decision I made to come to you, I guess."
Moira let out a soft, short chuckle. "That decision seems more like a necessity rather than an attempted shortcut. If you didn't have need of me, you wouldn't have come to me. Or is that assuming too much?"
"No, you're pretty much right, Doctor," he sighed. No point trying to hide it; with how much Overwatch actively despised her, any statement by him saying he didn't need her would just sound like blatant denial.
O'Deorain simply smiled at him in a self-satisfied way, then stepped back. "Well, Mr. Reyes, physically, you're in optimal shape. I assume that has something to do with the SEP program?"
"Yeah, that's right."
She made a thoughtful noise. "You can sit up now. And put your shirt back on if you're cold."
He gratefully pushed himself off the hard table and slipped his t-shirt back over his goosebump-studded skin. The Irish doctor returned, her hands now covered in sterile gloves, bearing a tray of tools that made him wince. Moira scoffed at his reaction, missing nothing.
"Come now. You've had blood taken before. It won't hurt that much."
He let her take and stretch his arm, staring at the opposite wall while she did her thing. It was all familiar, of course; the snap of the tourniquet, the cold damp and sharp scent of alcohol, the doctor's gentle warning of discomfort. Angela had done this a million times. But O'Deorain… she was a whole different breed of cat, like the fat, spoiled tabby his mother used to have that would purr at him while he petted it, only to suddenly turn on him and sink its claws into his unsuspecting hand. He knew it would happen, but he could never predict when, and the way it used to roll at his feet was irresistible to ten-year-old Gabriel. His brother used to call him "Gullible Gabe" due to his trusting nature, a nickname that, looking back on it, wasn't wrong.
He winced as Moira's needle pinched his arm. He supposed he always would be Gullible Gabe. He'd trusted that damn cat not to claw him. He'd trusted the Soldier Enhancement Program not to royally screw him or his best buddy, Jack, up. He'd trusted Overwatch to let him make a decision on the science department employee without judging him, an employee that he now had to hide from Overwatch proper. And now here he was, trusting an estranged scientist with dubious morals to fix the scrambled fuck-up that was the current state of his genes. You'll never learn, his brother taunted in his head. He supposed he wouldn't.
"You're quiet, Mr. Reyes."
He glanced at her; she was pressing a cotton ball to the puncture on his arm. "Oh. Yeah."
"Thoughts?"
"Not really. Just remembering things."
"Something in particular?"
"My brother. Just a nickname he used to call me."
She didn't press the issue. "You may go. We both have work to do, at any rate."
His gaze drifted to the five sealed vials of his blood (damn that was fast for five), and he fought back a shiver. "Uh…yeah."
"I will need your SEP records at some point, by the way."
He slid off the lab table and straightened. "Well, that will have to wait. Overwatch has a mission lined up, so I'll be gone for a couple days."
"Let me remind you, Mr. Reyes, that I cannot make progress without those records. Sooner or later I will need them if you still want treatment."
He grunted. "Right. Don't fuck me up, O'Deorain."
"Of course not," she responded, her back already turned to him and busy at her machines. "If you have need of anything, Commander, do come see me. I'll send the results as soon as I can."
He left the lab without a backward glance and rubbed at his stomach, trying to erase the nonexistent fingerprints the geneticist's freezing hands seemed to have pressed into his very skin.
AN: This chapter was a lot of fun to write. I do so enjoy scaring the crap out of the characters in a story. Or at the very least, making them really uncomfortable...
I hope this was as much fun to read as it was for me to write!