#so basically i wanted to read a pharmercy slowburn but like a very specific style

[euhemeria]

Rites of Unshared Spaces

Part One: Thoughts of Arid Paper Sea

Chapter One: Claustrophobia

She does not remember anything of what they said in the aftermath, and they have not spoken since. What could she say? I’m sorry might be a good start, for a number of reasons. But to apologize would be to invite a conversation about what happened, and that she has never quite felt ready for.

Fandom: Overwatch Rating: T Category: F/F Characters: Angela, Fareeha Warnings: N/A A slowburn Pharmercy fic wherein, after several years having not spoken to one another, Angela and Fareeha work to rekindle their friendship and along the way find something more. Also on ao3 and dreamwidth.

After a long journey, one never quite returns to the same home one left. Angela is intimately familiar with it, that queer in-betweenness, the acute awareness of all the little changes, the discomfort of expecting one thing and finding another. Aware too, is she, of the fact that even when things are perfectly preserved, she herself is changed enough that the once mundane is rendered alien. Too often, she has left for a short journey and returned someone else entirely, all that once was hers belonging, now, to some version of herself she will never be again. She knows well what it is to be a stranger in her own home.

Somehow, returning to Overwatch feels nothing like that.

It is changed, certainly, and nearly beyond recognition. Where once she was lured to join their ranks by gleaming new research facilities and the promise of funding beyond her wildest imagination, now she finds herself working with equipment that has not been touched in five years, let alone serviced in that time. There are not proper medical research facilities in Watchpoint: Gibraltar, either, not like there were in the old Headquarters. Instead, her only office is in the medical wing, which, in truth, was not built for long-term patient care, was meant to be used only in the direst emergencies before transferring patients to the far better equipped facilities in Geneva, under the watchful eyes of herself and her staff.

Her old office was so bright as to nearly be blinding, and the current one, situated half underground, is far dimmer, several of the lights in need of replacement. Despite her best attempts at cleaning it, the air still smells somewhat of disuse underneath the familiar sharp antiseptic. It is smaller, too, by far. Although her previous office was far from palatial—Overwatch never did put enough value on the sort of work done at a desk—it had, at least, space for her to meet with people when she needed to, and an adjoining conference room for those times when an office was insufficient. In this current space, she can barely fit her desk, a filing cabinet, and a second chair. It is far from comfortable, and she does as much of her paperwork as she can in the larger exam room, taking her notes as she goes.

Granted, she has had very little paperwork to do, as of yet, having not had to treat any particularly serious conditions aside from Mei’s initial injuries in Paris, and she can hardly complain about a lack of a conference room when there is no one to conference with. As of now, she is the only doctor on staff, and they have no nurses, technicians, physician’s assistants, or physical therapists to speak of. They are running a skeleton crew, at the moment—less than one.

But as few of them as are here, as empty as even this small base seems, in comparison to the bustle of the old days, already it feels like home in a way no other place has, since the shutdown. Here, the sound of Reinhardt laughing down the hall, there, the smell that lingers around Torbjörn after a long day in the workshop, and now, the familiar flash in the hallway of Lena hurrying off somewhere.

When Overwatch was shut down, Angela was glad for it, believed it for the best—thinks, still, that such was the right choice—but even then, a part of her was sad to see that chapter in her life close. In their own strange way, her squad mates became her family, and it hurt her, to leave them all behind.

But she did.

On the final night before the Petras Act went into effect, she said her goodbyes and departed for OCG, abandoning whatever she could not fit into her 20kg luggage allotment to the rubbish, and leaving no forwarding address. Overwatch had been so crushing, in those final years, so suffocating, the tension between Jack and Gabriel so thick that she could not breathe, at times, and she needed to be free of it, of any reminder of it. As best she could, she put distance between herself and those days, avoiding writing anyone, let alone calling or visiting, and with each passing month she felt the pressure lift, little by little.

It was not easy, the work she fled to, but the wide open sky as she walked from tent to tent on assignment in Venezuela gave her the chance to breathe for the first time in what felt like ages, eased the claustrophobia she suffered from in those final years with Overwatch.

When it had started, the fear, she cannot place. Or, rather, the fear itself has a simple origin—after her parents’ deaths, she had nightmares for years, dreamed she was with them as the hospital collapsed, felt the layers of concrete and debris fall in on her, crushing her slowly, slowly, slowly, each breath getting more and more difficult—but it had been in the past when she joined Overwatch, was something she had worked hard to overcome, in her teen years and early adulthood, and by the time she went into the field with Overwatch, she truly thought she was over it, was able to go to crowded indoor concerts so long as she stuck to the margins, was comfortable in elevators finally, and had even made plans with her boyfriend at the time to visit the Catacombs in Paris. She knows, now, that she was foolish to think that it was something she could get over, as simple as that, a fear she could conquer, ignoring its root cause, but she had been hopeful, in those days, and more than a little naïve, had truly thought she had laid her past to rest, and that there was no harm to be done, in continuously visiting disaster zones that reminded her of the past.

She ought to have learned quickly how wrong she was. Her third time out in the field, she was at the aftermath of a shelling in Alor Setar, spent the better part of an afternoon trying to prevent those survivors being pulled from the rubble from immediately being lost to crush and compartment syndrome. It was natural that she might have the old nightmare return, after that, if only for the night—and it was only the night, that first time, so she dismissed it. The stress of the situation would have disturbed anyone’s sleep, and they were all shaken, after that. Even with her nanobiotics, ACS mortality rates guaranteed a grueling day for everyone; it was easy to discount that first warning sign.

Looking back, she can chart the progression, but at the time, she did not want to see it. Even in retrospect, all but the most pivotal moments are difficult to pinpoint, so gradual was the decline. Rather than a linear worsening, a building of things to their inevitable conclusion, it was just an increasing frequency of bad days, until those bad days became the norm, and worse ones, which, too, became usual, and so on and so forth; perhaps more than anything, this scares her, because now she finds herself worrying, each time something happens, if it is again part of some greater pattern she cannot see.

What she knows is this: she was fine, when she joined Overwatch, or as close to fine as she has ever been, felt healthy and normal and unafraid, did not have to plan her days around her fear, was able to go and to do nearly anything she wanted, even did some things specifically because they scared her, and by the time she left, every room felt claustrophobic, even her lab.

The only safe place was the sky.

She should have run sooner, she knows that now. In her way, she did try to, left the lab for the field, took to the air, even ended her engagement, did anything she could to get out of the feeling of everything pressing down around her—anything but leave Overwatch. She must have known, she thinks, what was wrong on some level, must have realized the cause of it, but still, she did not put the blame on Jack, on Gabriel, not until the end, still thought it was her fault, somehow, assumed that the problem was her powerlessness in the face of death, did everything she could to seize control.

It did not help. She skipped the elevator for the stairs, whenever there were other people in it. She barely concealed a panic attack in the ORCA on the way back from London. She started doing her paperwork in the conference room, because her office was just too small.

Looking back, she can see how it happened, when, remembers being stuck with Jack and Gabriel in the lift one afternoon, shortly after Rialto, the tension between them so think the air felt unbreathable, remembers the argument they had, comms still on, as she, Lena, Reinhardt and Torbjörn made their way back from London, not stopping until Ana cut the channel, remembers when they came into her office, three weeks after Ana’s death, and an argument had exploded out of nowhere. She remembers, so clearly, the feeling of the walls closing in, and the air stale in her lungs as she took shorter breaths, the redness rising in her face and the way she started to sweat. She remembers that Jack and Gabriel never noticed, not even when she thought she was about to be ill, so absorbed were they in their argument; everything was collapsing in on her, and they could not see that anything was wrong.

That was the moment she realized, finally, that she needed to leave—too late. Headquarters came crashing down the next day, her worst fear realized.

She does not remember the aftermath. She knows what of it she has seen, in photographs and news footage, knows that she found her suit, somehow, that she stayed there for three days, pulling people out of the rubble, tending to the hurt, the dying, before she could do it no longer, knows she did it all with a face completely blank, unable to feel any of what was happening around her. She knows that, in the end, someone had to pull her away from a body—whose, thankfully, cannot be seen in the photographs—and that she fought them, screamed.

She knows that, after all of it, she called her ex-fiancé and left him a nearly incoherent message. She knows that he came, that he checked her into the hospital—nominally for dehydration—and that he made sure she was back in the care of her old therapist before he left. She does not remember anything of what they said, and she has not spoken to him since.

What could she say?

I’m sorry might be a good start, for a number of reasons. But to apologize would be to invite a conversation about what happened, and that she has never quite felt ready for. Even her old comrades, those who ought best to understand what it is she went through, who experienced it with her, the unraveling of their world, the constant pressure of the environment they were in and the powder keg they were sitting on, she has yet to speak to about it.

As best she could, she ran from them—ran from it all.

It felt, then, like a matter of survival, running away, felt like the only place she could breath was a thousand kilometers away from all of them, tending to strangers in disaster zones where all she had to do was step outside a tent to see the endless sky above her. She did not think, then, that she would not speak to any of them for another five years.

But she did not. With the exception of Genji, whose first letters began with important medical questions, and therefore could not be ignored, she avoided all of them. She told herself that she would get back in touch, when she felt well enough, would speak to them again when their presence was not an unpleasant reminder of all that they went through together, but the longer time went on the easier it was to just keep putting it off, and to believe that she was better off for it.

Were it not for Ana and Jack’s appearance at her doorstep, she might have continued in that way for the remainder of her life.

She still is not certain if she would have been better off for it.

Turmoil followed them, as always, led to her donning her suit again. And another kind of turmoil, afterward; in the tent, talking with Mahmoud, an old familiar feeling, the air too hot to breathe, her thoughts years away as her body betrayed her, a tear escaping before she could even realize.

No, going back would be a mistake. If one day with Ana and Jack was enough to provoke that, after her years of slow, steady progress, was enough to cut into her recovery so thoroughly—she could not possibly return to Overwatch. Not then, not ever.

Quickly as she could, she left Egypt, only briefly stopping back at her apartment to gather her things, told herself that she had to leave to prevent anyone else finding her. In truth, she was running, again, away from the feeling of Overwatch closing in, of the past catching up, of walls collapsing in on her. The thought that someone might actually pursue her was the least of her concerns, as the people she believed she was hiding from were her former colleagues, and so it came as an unpleasant surprise, a handful of weeks later, when the Recall came through, and an even more unpleasant one when an old acquaintance found her in Cyprus.

Initially, she had been happy to see Baptiste, had only worked with him for a week, in Venezuela, but remembered him fondly nonetheless; his positivity had been a breath of fresh air to her, then, so freshly out of Overwatch. He was not so happy to see her when he found her, however, and brought with him the news that Talon was tracking her—hunting her.

And there, a problem: Talon cares not for collateral damage. To be hunted means that ones mere presence in a location puts others at risk, making it nigh on impossible to do any meaningful humanitarian work. What good would it do, if she came to the site of a mudslide and saved a dozen people, two, if Talon, in pursuit of her, started a firefight that killed thirty-three more?

To go back home would pose similar dangers, would only invite an attack in another crowded area; one with better resources, perhaps, but no less innocent people or fewer potential victims of any fallout.

Where to go, then?

Only one place: Overwatch.

And so she finds herself here, in a basement office that might make anyone claustrophobic, let alone her, surrounded by she is by memories of the past.

But the familiar fear has not found her, not yet. All those years spent running, convinced that any contact with the people from her past, the ones she loved, would send her again spiraling, and instead, she finds she is fine, at least so far.

In fact, she is better than fine. For the first time in years, she finds herself among people she loves. Rather than feeling like no time passed at all, in the most negative sense, it instead feels the same in a good way. There is some momentary awkwardness, to be certain, when Lena says, “You never wrote me back!” but her excuses are accepted almost before she has uttered them, Lena excitedly remarking that, “S’alright, now I can get you all caught up in person! Em and I have…” and launching into a two hour monologue about the joys of cohabitation, and picking out wallpaper.

Reinhardt, too, seems to bare her no ill will, already aware that she did not write anyone else, either. Genji, she has nothing to smooth over with, Winston understands her need for space, Mei was in cryostasis, and Torbjörn and Brigitte are family to her, in their way. For all that Torbjörn grumbles about her having not come around, or bothered to call, she knows she is forgiven before she even needs ask.

It feels in the beginning, then, like she is coming home. For all the time that has passed, for all the different places their journeys have taken them, they have found themselves again here, and without Jack, without Gabriel, without the arguing and the anger just below the surface, it is a relief, to be again among friends, feels not like returning to the home she left, but the one from even further back that she told herself could never truly have been so beautiful as she remembered it.

Not quite the optimist she once was, she still sees the reality of their situation, knows that this peace may not last, long, once they find themselves in combat again, knows that she might soon be exposed to the sort of humanitarian crises that bother her the most, shellings, and thinks that will be the real test, how she reacts to that, will show her whether it really was the emotional tension that got to her, all that time in the first Overwatch, or if, indeed, it was the work too.

Most likely, she knows, it was some combination, but she could manage it, in MSF, the memories and the fear, had good days, and bad, but felt on the whole like she was recovering, not getting worse. If things go well here—if they can avoid the sort of conflicts that plagued them the first time, that made her feel like she was being crushed and simultaneously pulled apart—she thinks it might not be so intolerable, to stay.

If Overwatch has not become a sort of emotional sore spot for her, in and of itself.

That remains to be seen.

But, truly, what could she do if it were? Leave? And go where? Knowing that Talon is hunting her, knowing what they have done to the agents they have found—better to stay. Better to stay, no matter how miserable it makes her. Better to let herself become, again, the sort of person who sleeps with her curtains open and sneaks out of tense meetings to go outside and catch her breath under the pretense of a smoke break, with no excuse for why she does not smell of it when she returns inside. Better to live in a cage than to die like—

No. No she cannot think of it that way, cannot let herself believe she is stuck here, because then it all comes tumbling back, collapsing in on her just like she always knew it would.

They assigned her a room, a private one, since she is one of the higher ranking members to return. She says it smells moldy, and she would rather sleep in the main bunks with Lena and Mei until she is quite certain it is remediated.

There, she has to worry about her nightmares waking the others, but at least she falls asleep confident that she will wake, dreams less often of the ceiling collapsing in on her, on all of them.

Why could they not have ended up at a base where more of the compound was aboveground?

In a way, she supposes, this too feels like home. The fear is a familiar one, was common in her time in Overwatch originally, and to the years after she lost her parents, and even before that, in the earliest years of her childhood, where she fell asleep every night with the knowledge that she might not wake in time to escape the next nighttime raid.

Then, it was worse. Even the sky was no escape, the moon and the stars blanketed by the ships overhead. Now, when she wakes, she can at least sneak outside, look up, and see that the sky is clear.

It occurs to her that she feels more at home with this fear than she ever did without it.

She tries not to dwell on that too much.

But it is undeniable, the past few years feel, the longer she is here, like they were some strange interlude, and do not fit within the greater continuity of her life. Like her engagement before, they feel almost like she was playing at what life ought to be, what she thinks it is for other people, not what life has always been for her. Which is to say this: people she loves, who love her. Desire to help others, above all else. The fear that threatens to suffocate her.

It kept you alive, a therapist told her, once. It did, she knows, but it is hard not to see, too, all the ways it kept her from living. So afraid, was she, of fear itself, of what it would do to her, to be consumed by it, that she did not reach out to her friends, her only real family, for years. It made her think that the only way she could be safe, could be happy, was if she ran from everyone she knew, if she abandoned her support system in the time when they needed one another the most.

That therapist also told her to not let the fear control her, she knows, in a different conversation, only said that first part so she would stop hating herself for being afraid, for the things the claustrophobia of her teen years kept her from doing. Still, it is hard to see the value in it, now, even if she survived the places she let it take her, that need to be free of everyone, of everything she thinks is holding her down.

At least they have forgiven her, her friends. At least they have welcomed her back. She never doubted that they would, not really, knew that they loved her, but she did doubt her ability to accept that love, was afraid it would feel, again, like a kind of smothering, or that even being around them would be an uncomfortable reminder of the past, of a time when her worst fears were realized, and the world truly did collapse in on her.

So far, that has not been the case. Perhaps she really did heal, in her time away. She can separate, now, the claustrophobia, in the true sense, from the sensation of being trapped emotionally, suffocated by the tension in her working environment as she was before. She knows what she feels, now, is mostly the latter, is so because she has been forced back here by the threat to her life, not because of anything within the organization, and not because it is really bothering her, the size of the rooms she is in.

It gets worse, certainly, with stress, and so it was hard, before, to disentangle the two, but after her years in MSF experiencing only the one, she thinks she can identify, now, the difference.

What she felt, when Overwatch was ending, was not claustrophobia at all, not really, was only the culmination of the stress and the pressure of the environment, the compromises she was asked to make, the betrayals of her principles, her very self.

It is still not ideal, she knows, that she reacted so badly, suffered so much. Overwatch is, after all, is not an easy place to work, and she will no doubt have to grapple with that again, but it helps, to know she was not the only one. Ana is so different now, or seemed so when they met, and Reinhardt—they all know what happened to him. Still, he is back. If they can trust him, then surely they can trust her. She will have to be careful, this time, to not be so naïvely certain that she is only claustrophobic, and to think herself cured of that, as well, will have to be more aware of the sort of gradual decline she experienced last time, so that she can catch it before it gets to the point where it seems impossible to come back from. Before Overwatch, and after it, she worked in high pressure environments, and she knows she can do so again, particularly with the support of her friends—her family—now that she has them back.

Or, most all of them.

Cole, she thinks, might be more difficult to win back when he returns. He is more easily wounded than the rest of them, and not nearly so quick to forgive as Lena. When she called him to verify what Baptiste had told her, he was curt, insisted that she go meet up with Winston and the others for her safety, and ended the call before she could begin to say anything else. He might have been busy—she thought she heard something in the background, and it would be far from the first time he answered one of her calls in the middle of a firefight, terrible a habit as that is—but he might, too, have been angry, have been hurt. He is due to be back in a few hours time, bringing with him new recruits, and she thinks they will have to discuss it then.

Out of anyone, after all, she thinks he has the most right to be cross with her. They were close, once, and although the revelations about Blackwatch’s activities towards the end of their time together put a strain on things, before he left, she knows he made overtures towards an apology in the years since, could not stop herself from reading the beginnings of his postcards like she could avoid opening the letters sent by everyone else.

Angie, started the first one, his nickname for her she begrudgingly tolerated, only because it was him.

Angela, a few postcards later, when it became clear that his first few attempts garnered no response.

I’m sorry, said the last few, no other address needed. They both knew who she was to him.

Please, the final one, two years ago.

That relationship, she fears, might take some mending, some time. Always, their friendship was a singular one, and she thinks that it will take them a while to find their footing with one another again; their perspectives on everything have always been so very different that she fears that with so many years apart, it may be difficult to know what to say to him, when the time comes.

Still, she will try. She will meet him when he lands, will hug him, if he lets her, if he is not too angry, too wounded, smarting still from her rejection.

Eventually, she knows, he will come around.

Or perhaps sooner than eventually. Far sooner.

“Angie?” It is the first thing he says, as he departs from the ship, sounding for all the world surprised to see her there, as if he did not practically order her to return to the Watchpoint when last they spoke.

But maybe he is surprised—it is early, 03:00, and only she and Winston are there at the hangar, waiting for their ship to dock. She can see why, after years of silence, he would not have expected her to come out to meet him.

“Cole!” She hopes she sounds excited to see him, and not nearly so anxious as she feels.

She must, because he repeats her name and practically runs up to her, arms open—and stops just short of hugging her. Although she appreciates the hesitation, remembering, likely, that hugs can be intolerable to her, sometimes, on days when she feels worse, she is quick to close the gap, wants little more than to be able to hug him back, in this moment.

“I missed ya.” As if it were that simple.

“I missed you too.” Maybe it is, in this moment. Later, they will have much to discuss, apologizing and catching up to do, and it will take them some time, she suspects, to really get back to where they were, before everything, but here and now, it hardly seems to matter. He still smells the same, cigars and whiskey and beneath it all himself, and he may be less one arm—which she is certainly going to make him explain later—but he still hugs her the same way, and speaks in that familiar voice. They have both been changed by the years, that much is immediately clear, but in the face of the friendship they had, perhaps that does not matter nearly so much as Angela feared. Cole is still the same person she cared about, no matter the ways time has changed him, has changed her.

For a moment, it feels like coming home.

Then, over his shoulder, she sees an unexpected face.

“Fareeha?”

She knew Fareeha had received the Recall, but she had heard, too, from Lena, and Reinhardt, and Brigitte, that she had declined, and so it is quite the surprise to see her old friend here—if a very welcome one.

“Fareeha!” she repeats, pulling out of Cole’s arms in order to go give a proper greeting, already reaching out to touch her when—

“Doctor Ziegler,” is the response. Clipped, curt, professional as Fareeha steps around her and begins making her way out of the hangar, although she cannot possibly know where it is she is going, does not know how they have reorganized the Watchpoint in order to use it as their temporary headquarters.

For a moment, Angela is too stunned to move, just stands there watching Fareeha leave, blocking the exit of the other people still aboard the ship in the process. Then her mind and her body catch up, and she forces herself to move, to get out of the way.

Perhaps some things have changed, after all.