ivan, probably

---

Freja wakes to her lower stomach trying to tear itself apart. Bright cramps, pooling just above her hip bones. 

Goddamn fucking IUD- it’d expelled last month and now she’s having to deal with menstrual cycles again. She’d figured she’d be able to get a new one after turning in just one more job, and of course that “job” had turned into. . . this. 

Now she’s laying on a Talon cot in her own little officer’s quarters. Bleeding out onto the bleach-white sheets. There’s a little wavy spot in her vision as she stares at the ceiling, the same place it always does. She has maybe fifteen minutes before the migraine begins. 

She rolls out of bed and sprints to the tiny attached toilet/shower combo off her room. But it’s too late- her shorts are already soaked through. Everywhere she touches stains the white porcelain. 

Her head starts to throb by the time she finishes stemming the flow with a pair of the most absorbent tampons money can buy, then cleaning up the rest of herself so she doesn’t drip across the floor when she waddles back to her wardrobe to grab fresh clothing. Then it’s back to the toilet to finish installing the rest of the absorbing padding required for her to lay down on her back without making a mess.

Then she finally, finally returns to bed and shuts her eyes. Dull lightning pulses behind her eye sockets. Her ears ring. She groans and presses her forehead into her pillow. 

It isn’t like Talon offers international health insurance, and her odds of returning to her native Denmark in the next year are slim to none. And she is not going to present herself to what Talon called their ‘medical division’; the mere idea of Moira O’Deorain being allowed anywhere near her gynecological health makes her more nauseous than the cramping already is. 

So fine. She’ll tough it out. Like she'd toughed it out through high school and college before she got the right diagnosis. 

. . . but for the first day of her cycle like this, Talon and everyone in it can go fuck themselves on a strip of barbed wire. She’s not letting them drag her out on a mission. Not today.

In a moment of timing that confirms whatever twisted deity runs the universe hates her, there’s a knock on the door.

She stays still and silent. 

Another knock, louder this time. 

Freja’s going to kill whoever’s on the other side of that door. She’s going to kill them. She can hear a man’s voice, but it’s too muffled for her to figure out who. 

She gets out of bed. Smooths down her hair. Runs a hand down her face to set it into a neutral expression. Each step towards the door introduces a new pulse of pain behind her eyes. She forces it down. 

She cracks open the door. “Skov speaking.” 

“Freja! Are you alright?” 

Her chin curls towards her chest from the brightness of Emre’s voice. 

“I’m fine.” She says. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me- it’s almost 9AM. And you weren’t responding, so I got worried.” 

“I’m fine.” She says in the most convincing tone she can muster. “Leave me alone.” 

She can hear his breath hit the doorframe. “Not feeling well?”

She sighs. “Migraine. Now go?” 

“I’ll get you a bag of ice. Shouldn’t be too hard around here.” 

Cold against her temples sounds heavenly. Anything to cool the red-hot pain. Conversely, she fantasizes about a blanket fresh from the dryer for the cramps happening between her hips. 

She hears Emre take a step. She cracks the door open wider. One of the door hinges creaks.

“Yeah?” He turns around. She’s met with the look of blatant concern in his eyes. How is he able to do that with just his eyes? 

“Get me a heating pad also?” She whispers. 

“On it. Get comfortable, alright?” 

He walks off. She limps back to bed. With practiced tension in every joint of her body, she manages to lower herself down without making the ache in her head any worse. 

She doesn’t know how much time passes before Emre returns. He opens the door. The first part of him to enter is the red-orange light from the screen on his chest, though the iris dims as it registers the darkness. He turns around to shut the door behind himself and she can see his shadow cringe when the door hinges squeak. 

His footsteps are silent as he crosses the small quarters to her bedside. 

“Fresh cold pack. Stole it straight from the medic’s office. Upgrade from just regular ice, right?” He whispers as he sets the white package down on her nightstand. “Should last a few hours at least.”

“Mhmm.” 

“And the heating pad. Where do you want it?”

She grabs it and lays it across her stomach.

“Ah. I see.” He nods solemnly. “Have you taken any painkillers?”

She sighs. “It’s fine.” 

“Let me get some for you.” 

He leaves the room before she can say that it’s fine. In his absence, she perches the ice pack across the bridge of her nose. 

It helps shield her eyes from the light of the screen on his chest when he returns. The iris doesn’t adjust to the darkness this time; she can see flickers through the ice pack as it moves. 

“Sorry,” Emre whispers. “Here. I’ll leave this-” 

A dial-up noise, from the earbud of her comm device on her desk. A similar noise spills from around Emre’s head. He dashes across the room to silence hers, and she makes out bits and pieces of the words from where the call blasts in his ear. 

“MISSION ASSIGNMENT. . . ARRIVAL IN KANEZAKA AT. . . SARIOĞLU AND SKOV-” 

Emre gasps. Something like electricity crackles. Freja pulls the icepack off her eyes. 

Emre freezes in place, shoulders tense, clenching both his real palm and the water bottle he’s holding in his cybernetic one. The iris flashes. The light from it reflects off the mirror and into her eyes, and she grunts in pain before she can stop herself. 

The full brunt of the iris’s gaze falls onto her bed. She can do nothing but squeeze her eyelids shut and hide the wince as best she can. 

But then the light shuts off. She cracks open her eyes, only to see Emre’s glowing blank against the dark. Her heart jumps in her chest. She lets out the panic as a long, slow exhale. 

The entity possessing him looks down to his hands. It curls open his palm, revealing a handful of ibuprofen. The iris on his chest blinks back on, at a brightness setting barely visible against the black of the screen, and it stares at the pills for a few seconds. 

Emre’s head turns to look at her. 

She has her knife under her pillow but that won’t do much against- against- she’d left her bola and all her other real weapons in the wardrobe across the room. 

His- its hands trail towards her. 

One fist tilts. Five pills clink, one after another, against the nightstand. 

Then it opens the water bottle and sets it beside the pills. 

It steps back, and then it stomps out of the room, slamming the door shut behind itself. When her world stops spinning from the adrenaline, when the loudness stops hammering into her skull, she coaxes herself into a sitting position and grabs the flashlight on her nightstand. 

She squints and inspects the pills. They all look. . . normal. Unadulterated, she thinks. She turns the flashlight off and against more cautious judgement, she throws all of the pills in her mouth and washes them down with water from the freshly-opened water bottle. 

She lays her head back, resettles her ice pack over her eyes, and surrenders to the pain for the next few hours. 

—

Emre stumbles back into her room late in the day. She didn’t realize she’d left the door unlocked. She can tell it’s him, though, by the unevenness in his gait.

He gets close enough for her to see that his eyes are empty of any sort of light, even the usual spark. 

Freja should sit up. She needs to sit up. Needs to say that she is fine and ask how the mission went. That’s the least she should do, for breaking her promise to keep an eye on him, just because her stupid uterus threw a fucking fit. Like it did for half the entire human race, and yet she’s too weak-willed to push through it.  

But before she can will her muscles to move, Emre slides down against the side of her bed and leans his head back into the mattress. He rubs his face and exhales into his palms. 

Freja swallows. “Em-?”

“Shhh, it’s okay.” Emre uncovers his face. “Everything’s alright.” 

He reaches up and places his hand, his real hand, over her own. 

He was the one who just came back from a mission, and he was trying to comfort her? 

This isn’t right. It isn’t right. She’s failing him, failing him at the one goddamned promise she swore she was going to keep this time. Instead she’s running away from it. Like she always does. 

She should be better than this. 

“ . . . the mission?” She forces out of her throat as she pulls her hand away. “How did it go?”

“I’m alright. Get some rest. I’ll be here.”

“Be here?”

“To keep watch. You’re safe.” 

She doesn’t know what to feel; the first emotion in her chest is indignation. She’d forgotten to lock the door, but that doesn’t mean she’s. . . helpless, like this. She is no slouch with the knife under her pillow, so long as her combatant was anyone other than the nigh-impervious machine simmering beneath his skin.

And this was certainly out of line from anything he’d ever done back in Overwatch. But that was a decade ago- this is now, after nine or ten years of. . . him waking up in random cities with no recollection of how he’d gotten there. 

. . . he probably wished he’d had someone to watch over him whenever he was ill.

The thought threatens to make her cry, which spikes her pulse, which brings a new hammering of pain to her eye sockets. God, she doesn’t deserve someone like him. Least of all now. 

Although maybe this was helping him feel better, too. He’d said similar things, about not deserving anything. Maybe he thinks he’s paying back whatever debt he thinks he owes. 

And if that’s the case, then. . . she’ll allow it.