Chapter Text
“So strange yet we’re so well acquainted.” — ABBA, I Let the Music Speak
At first, he was just a name on a file.
A man brought in too late, too broken, with too much history attached to him for anyone to pretend it was simple. The kind of patient the staff spoke about in clipped voices once the doors closed, because everybody knew what the Shimada name meant even if they didn’t say it out loud.
Angela didn’t treat names. She treated bodies.
She took one look at the damage and went brisk and clinical, because there was no room for anything else. She didn’t ask him who he was. She didn’t ask him what he’d done. She didn’t ask him if he deserved saving. She assigned tasks, snapped gloves on, kept her voice level, and kept him alive.
After, people tried to make it a story. A miracle. A symbol. Something inspirational they could print on a poster.
Angela mostly remembered the quiet bits.
The way he woke and didn’t speak for a long time. The way he stared at the ceiling like he was waiting for judgement. The way his eyes tracked every movement in the room even when he pretended he wasn’t afraid. The way he hated needing help so much he’d rather bleed in silence than ask for a glass of water.
She expected anger. She expected arrogance. She expected entitlement.
What she got was a man who looked like he had been removed from his own life and didn’t know where to put his hands.
So she stayed professional. Brisk. Efficient. She spoke to him like she spoke to everyone else, clear instructions, steady reassurance, no nonsense. She told herself he was any other patient.
He wasn’t.
Not because he was famous. Not even because he was tragic. Because he tried so hard not to need her.
Recovery was slow. Ugly. Not heroic. There were nights the pain made him silent in a way that wasn’t calm, just controlled. There were mornings he arrived to physical therapy already sweating because he’d done extra work alone, like he could out train the feeling of being helpless.
Angela caught him the first time.
He was in the therapy room after hours, lights dimmed, trying to stand without using the rails. Jaw set. Shoulders tight. Stubbornness disguised as discipline.
She didn’t soften. She didn’t scold him, either. She just leaned against the doorway and said, flatly, that if he fell, she wasn’t catching him.
His head turned. A beat of surprise.
Then the corner of his mouth twitched like he’d almost forgotten humour existed.
“Noted,” he said.
That was the first crack.
Not romance. Not destiny. Just the tiniest moment of mutual recognition in the middle of something miserable.
After that, he started waiting for her.
Not obviously. Not like a man outside a door. He’d be “passing through” when she finished a shift. He’d be in the corner of the therapy room when she came in with a clipboard. He’d sit in the medbay lounge with a cup of tea he wasn’t drinking, as if the chair had simply become his by accident.
Angela told herself it was routine. Familiarity. Safety.
She also started checking the clock more than she needed to.
They learned each other in small, practical ways. He learned how she liked her coffee, black and too strong, because she drank it like medication. She learned that he hid discomfort by going very still and going very polite. He learned not to push her when she went quiet. She learned the difference between his silence when he was calm and his silence when he was… gone.
They became a kind of team without anyone calling it that.
He’d show up to therapy already warmed up because he hated wasting her time. She’d pretend not to notice and adjust his plan anyway, because she always noticed.
Sometimes he tried to get under her skin in tiny ways that were almost sweet if you didn’t look too hard.
He’d answer a question too literally, just to see if she’d roll her eyes. He’d watch her tap her pen against her clipboard when she was thinking. He corrected her english pronunciation quietly one time, and the next day she left him a small Swiss chocolate branded chocolate bar on his tray with a note that said *try not to be unbearable today.*
He kept the note.
It wasn’t that Angela didn’t have colleagues. She did. People she respected. People she could talk to.
It was that she didn’t have anyone who waited for her without wanting something.
Genji didn’t ask her to be anything but consistent.
That made him dangerous to her in a way she didn’t name yet.
Then Blackwatch happened, not like a decision, like a trap.
Reyes didn’t offer Genji purpose. He offered him a job shaped like a leash. Redemption packaged as obligation. A place to stand where nobody had to wonder what to do with him.
Genji said yes with a calm that looked like acceptance and felt like resignation.
Angela found out after the fact, like she always did with things decided above her pay grade.
She didn’t explode. She didn’t beg. Not then.
She just stared at him in a corridor and said, “You’re not ready for that.”
He kept his face neutral. “They say I am.”
“They aren’t the ones who have to put you back together,” she replied, and walked away before her voice could soften.
After that, they saw each other in a different rhythm.
Less routine. More aftermath.
Genji started coming back from missions with that controlled stillness that meant he was holding himself together by force. Angela stopped asking questions that would make him shut down. Instead, she’d just pull gloves on, clean the blood off his hands, patch the shallow wounds, and talk about nothing, the kind of nothing that kept you tethered to normal life.
Sometimes he’d sit on the medbay bed while she worked and murmur an observation like he was pretending it didn’t matter.
Your hair is different today.
You didn’t eat.
You’re limping.
She’d answer in the same tone, neutral, practical, like they weren’t doing something intimate by noticing.
There were operations where she’d be attached in a strictly medical capacity, extraction support, emergency response, and Genji would be there too, always a fraction closer than necessary. Never touching her. Never crowding. Just positioned so if anything shifted wrong, she’d never be the one caught off guard.
London. Russia. Places that tasted like smoke and rain and adrenaline.
It made her furious, sometimes. Not because she didn’t understand it, but because she did.
She didn’t want to be treated like something fragile. She didn’t want to be looked after without permission. She’d built her whole life on being useful, being competent, being the one people relied on, and Genji kept quietly flipping that, putting himself between her and the worst of the world like it was the most natural thing.
And the part she hated most was how her body relaxed when he did it.
Venice was supposed to be contained. A clean operation. A discreet success.
It blew up instead.
Reyes killed Bartalotti. Blackwatch became public. Everything got dragged into the light, hearings, politics, blame, silence that tasted like shame. Genji got benched, watched, handled, treated like a weapon that had slipped out of its case.
Angela watched him break in tiny, controlled ways.
Training too hard. Sleeping too little. Speaking less. Smiling never.
She found him one night not in the medbay, not in therapy, but in a quiet stretch of corridor like he’d been dropped there and forgotten. He was leaning against the wall, arms folded, eyes fixed on nothing in particular. The kind of stillness that wasn’t calm. The kind that came before you did something self destructive just to feel in control again.
“You can’t stay with them,” she said.
He didn’t look at her at first. “They’re what I’m for.”
Angela’s jaw tightened. “That’s not true.”
He finally turned his head, and for a second she saw it plainly, the fear underneath the control. The old wound that had nothing to do with his body.
“If I stop,” he said quietly, “what am I.”
Angela hated how much that hit her.
Because somewhere along the way, he’d stopped being her patient. He’d stopped being a case. He’d become the only person who felt like he existed in her life outside of work.
So she did something she almost never did.
Something personal.
She stepped closer and said, “Come with us.”
He gave a small, humourless exhale. “Overwatch won’t want me.”
Angela didn’t flinch. “I do.”
Not love. Not a confession. Not yet.
But it was the first time she let the fondness show without hiding behind her job.
He stared at her like he couldn’t decide if it was comfort or danger.