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“I just don’t agree with it,” says Ana Amari. Her voice, distorted by the way sound travels through wires to reproduces itself throgh Fareeha’s cell phone speaker, still manages to convey disapproval in the signature way only Ana Amari is capable of.
Amazing.
Even technology bends to the will of the older Amari.
Fareeha exhales a sigh, mutters: “of course you don’t."
The “it” of their current conversation is Fareeha’s nomination and acceptance into a position on the Council. The Council is a group of powerful and intelligent individuals of the magical world, selected by their peers to make and enforce policies regarding the magical world. The world of magic exists on the fringe of the mortal one; it operates, sustains itself, and protects humans (who are under constant magical threat, but who should probably never know that), but due to an unfortunate event nearly a century ago, goes widely unknown.
Ana knows, like Fareeha knows, that Fareeha’s role will be more of an enforcer-of-the-peace type. And it will sometimes be dangerous.
Ana has served in the human army and on the Council herself, at one point; she never wanted that kind of life for Fareeha. Fareeha gets it, she really does. After all, she grew up wondering where he mother was, what she was doing, and never knowing. She knows where Ana's worries come from ... But she is an adult and she is smart, and she is competent, and she is a shape-shifter - like her mother. She is not a child, and she is capable of making her own decisions.
Shape-shifters are protectors, and Fareeha will not defy her nature to pretend to be anything else.
“I don’t see why you couldn't pursue something more worthwhile. You could have been a ... detective perhaps? Or, oh! A lawyer? You’ve always looked very good in a suit.”
“Mother,” Fareeha groans, “I do not think I would have done very well in either of those settings.”
“My beloved,” sighs Ana, after a time.
“It will be fine,” Fareeha replies. “You know ... we do not get deployed very often.”
“No,” Ana agrees, “but that is only because you will not be deployed for anything less than the most severe cases. Can you blame a mother for worrying?”
There’s a pause and perhaps Ana senses Fareeha’s disappointment; that she is not as thrilled as Fareeha had hoped she might be; that she is not happy for her. So, after a brief moment of contemplation, Fareeha hears something like a clap of her mother’s hands and then Ana says: “well, that settles it, I suppose. I’m coming to visit you.”
Fareeha pales on the other end of the line.
“That is - that is not necessary,” Fareeha stutters, and tries to keep the panic out of her voice; but has a sneaking suspicion it leaks in anyway.
Ana is a somewhat … chaotic presence in Fareeha’s life.
“Nonsense,” Ana says, a knowing smile evident in her voice, “this is a big event and we must celebrate accordingly. I will come in next Saturday, make sure that you are able to pick me up from the airport.”
"Mother- I-"
Ana says goodbye so quickly Fareeha hasn’t a second to object. The line goes cold and Fareeha is left clutching her phone, mouth slightly agape, wondering what has become of her life.
Angela Ziegler is sitting on her porch, reading a tome of healing magic before work when a black cat darts across her yard. In fact, she is reading outside precisely because of this black cat, who has been darting across her yard for the better part of a month now. Something about the way it moves - confident, but not as coordinated as a cat might be - makes Angela think that it isn’t quite right, that perhaps it is not a cat, but a familiar spirit. If that is the case, she’d like to know.
Regardless, the cat is endearing: a little larger than your average cat and quick as a flash of lightning.
She hasn’t called to it before, only observed, but this time she does. Clicking her tongue, she says:
“Hi kitty!”
The cat’s head whips around, mid run, and she meets its eyes - intelligent eyes, deep, brown eyes - for a brief second. Angela is wholly caught off guard, and she feels spellbound, rooted ...
… And then the cat hits her mailbox, square on, and with surprising force rolls across the yard.
“Mein gott-” Angela blinks, leaping to her feet. Her book flies out of her hands and lands with a thud on the wooden porch steps. However, before she can even approach it, the cat is back on its feet and dashing out of sight. Angela watches owlishly.
Fareeha is sporting a bump in the middle of her forehead which she rubs discreetly as she boards the elevator.
“Rough mornin’?” says McCree. He hugs the left wall as Fareeha steps in; holding his hat in his hands, and smiling at her as only someone who is hoping to hear a story might.
Fareeha has known Jesse McCree for years - he worked with her mother when they were both much young, and is like a brother to her - so she has no qualms about muttering: “I do not want to talk about it.”
Mercifully, Jesse doesn’t push, but he does chuckle.
“Excited for yer first day?” He says, finding better conversation there.
“Yes,” replies Fareeha simply, “I do not want to make a bad first impression.”
“Think you’d be hard pressed,” laughs McCree, “ain’t nobody around here capable of bein’ serious for more than a couple minutes off the job.”
“I think that you are projecting your own work ethic on others where there are no similarities,” says Fareeha, flashing a smirk.
“You callin’ me lackadaisical?” McCree balks, feigning hurt. Fareeha rolls her eyes. The elevator opens for them on the twelfth floor of an eleven-floored sky-rise. They both step out, Fareeha dusts off her blazer out of priority rather than any real need to do so and responds:
“No,” a pause, a toothy grin, “in part because I have no idea what the word means.”
“Com’on Fareeha, I taught you this one,” McCree mutters, pulls his hat over his eyes in disappointment. Fareeha chuckles.
The twelfth floor has a lot going on at any given time. It is a bit of a sensory overload, actually. Fareeha remembers visiting when she was a young girl and, in a way, very little has changed. There’s a large board with a running feed of magical activity going on in the world on a wall opposite the elevators, a lot of agents are running around, flying around, someone jumps into a portal to their left and reappears a few seconds late to their right wearing a different outfit. (Time jumpers are an especially dangerous crowd when they’re rogue, Fareeha knows, and trickier to catch from what her mother tells her.) McCree greets this one with a languid “howdy, Tracer,” receives an “ello love!” in return. Fareeha notes the name.
McCree wanders off to do … whatever it is McCree does, and Fareeha checks in with Winston to report for her first day. She spends the morning getting acquainted with her desk, her team, the building and by the afternoon she feels pretty well established with her roll. She probably won’t have an assignment the first week, but she spends a significant amount of time reading over the current assignments of other teams, and past missions - it never hurts to have an understanding of what may possibly come up.
She’s also discovering that perhaps Jesse was not wrong. A vast majority of his time, and the time of the people around her is spent talking and goofing off.
At nearly five a team comes back from a mission through Tracer’s time portal and one of them is bleeding profusely; another seriously injured. The entire office atmosphere seems to change. Winston approaches the team, calls out in a voice that is soft, hypnotic, comforting - if takes Fareeha a moment to realizes this is intentional.
“Go get Angela,” he says, “she’ll be in the research labs.”
Fareeha, who has had the most basic of first aid training from her time in law enforcement is on her feet, and two steps towards the group when a swirl of fog appears beside Winston and is gone an instant later. Leaving only a woman. A woman Fareeha knows.
Angela does not notice Fareeha, she’s instantly working literal magic on the two hurt agents (a yellow glow lights the whole vicinity), and probably would not recognize her, even if she did. After all, she’s only ever seen Fareeha in the form of a cat; most recently running headlong into a wooden pole.
If the situation weren’t so serious, perhaps the mortification of this morning would bubble back into Fareeha and she’d be forced to relive that travesty. As it is, she watches in awe as the injured parties are magicked back to chipper health. One of the two, a frogman, flashes her the most winning grin, any trace of blood all but gone.
Fareeha hears him say thank you, hears Angela’s laugh like spun gold weave through the air. She calls him Lúcio, Fareeha notes the name.
“All better,” Angela tells them both, “though I must warn you to be more careful. This magic is tricky.” Fareeha considers approaching her, but she sounds tired. Angela saves her the trouble when she turns to the side and catches her eye.
There’s some emotion which flashes across the witch’s eyes which Fareeha cannot identify, but then she smiles in a weary way and Fareeha feels her heart leap into her throat. Right there, she resolves to do something nice for the witch.
After all, her house is only a mile out from Fareeha’s. She passes it everyday.
Angela sits on her porch steps that night feeling thoroughly worn out. Having healed Lúcio and Hana, she can barely feel her arm. This happens, from time to time. Magic comes with a price, every good witch knows. If a little numbness is the price she pays for the healing arts, it is worth it.
It’s nearly dusk and her tome is dog eared and closed in her lap. She thinks of the energy suck which is magical healing (and then she thinks very briefly, and almost of no volition of her own, about a pair of brown eyes, a beautiful face, but just as it came, it goes again.) She thinks perhaps, for once, she’ll call it an early evening, and she’s halfway to the idea of standing when she catches a glint out of the corner of her eyes.
A few moments later, the cat comes into view from behind the tree line which separates the magical sector from the human neighborhood on the other side.
Angela is thoroughly surprised to find it dragging takeout behind it. In fact, the image is so bizarre that Angela catches herself laughing.
The cat deposits the bag by her hand. Steps back. Blinks slowly. Looks to the side. Meows. And then runs off. Perhaps Angela isn’t so far off in her suspicions that this is a familiar. Angela knows, too, that a witch should not deny the generosity of a benevolent entity.
The food is still warm.
It’s also delicious.
On her way to work the next morning, Fareeha smells warm milk and stops outside of Angela’s house to see a saucer left out on the porch.
Fareeha suddenly come to the conclusion that perhaps Angela thinks that she is a real cat … and she’s not entirely sure how to get out of this mess, honestly.
In the meantime, she tips the saucer over, afraid to disappoint the witch, by having her return home to discover it hasn’t been touched, and then continues on her way to work.
That night, on her way home from work, Fareeha finds that Angela is on the lookout for her. Angela calls to her again, and Fareeha trips over her front paws in her attempt to look graceful. Which is basically the exact opposite of what she wanted.
Angela has seen Fareeha Amari three times in three days and never in her life has she met a more beautiful woman. Fareeha holds herself with a certainty Angela has never seen before, she knows more about the Council that most of it’s board members, she speaks eloquently, if not a bit tersely at time…
... and she is absolutely driving Angela mad.
Because Angela cannot, for the life of her, discern the type of magical being that Fareeha is ... And she has certainly tried.
“I knew your mother,” Angela says, making small talk in the breakroom. Angela rarely leaves the research lab during the day, but she’d kind of been hoping to bump into Fareeha, who she has learned keeps a very strict schedule. “She must be very proud of you.”
Fareeha smiles in a subdued way. Angela feels a heat beneath her skin she is refusing to acknowledge.
“We have some disagreements,” says Fareeha, a pause and then: “but, yes, I think that she is.”
“You do seem to take after her,” says Angela. Angela is hoping that she’ll say yes, that she’ll let on that maybe she is a shapeshifter? Angela is honestly just looking for any foothold to sedate her curiosity.
Fareeha, who is not stupid, knows what she’s doing. Angela Ziegler, Fareeha has also learned in their short time together, is also not so subtle. (Then again, neither is Fareeha; not really.)
But Fareeha has tripped over her own feet, run into a stationary pole, brought her food, and stumbled across the witch’s yard too many times now. She will die of embarrassment before she ever reveals any of this.
Ana Amari arrives on Thursday, a full three days earlier than anticipated. For this reason, Fareeha is not at the airport to pick her up, and for this reason, rather than call her, Ana decides that the trek to her daughter’s house is not so long that she can’t make it there herself.
Perhaps she has been slightly influenced by Jesse, who tells her that not only has Fareeha met Angela at work (Ana always did like Angela, the brightest witch she’d ever met, and an exceedingly kind woman), but that apparently her beloved Fareeha, usually so collected and in control, has been a bit foolish running past the good doctor’s house. (“Took a lot o’ convin’ to get the story outta her, ma’am,” said Jesse, a grin in his voice).
Ana decides to make a visit to an old friend.
Angela opens her door on the third knock, her hair up, her glasses on. There’s a split second where recognition graces her features and then she pulls the older Amari into a hug and says, happily: “Ana!”
“Hello, dear,” Ana smiles, hugging her back.
“I’m so glad to see you,” Angela says, sincerely, releasing her. “After the incident and you’re disappearance…” she trails off and Ana smiles placidly.
“In the past,” Ana replies. Removing them both from bad memories. Angela hums, and then seeming to remember herself she pushes her door open further.
“Would you like to come in?” She says.
“Another time,” says Ana, “I’m on my way to visit my daughter, you know her?” Ana sees the blush the younger woman tries to suppress and she smirks behind a hand.
“Yes,” says Angela, “I met her earlier this week - at work. Does she … does she live around her?”
Angela cannot recall having ever seen Fareeha outside of work, she’s sure she would know if she saw her anywhere else. Fareeha is … Fareeha has a way of captivating a crowd.
There’s a secretive kind of glint in Ana’s eyes and a knowing smile on her lips.
“Oh yes,” Ana says, her voice almost too sweet. Angela looks at her skeptically. “You have probably seen her about - she’s a shapeshifter. Takes after her mother. Loves to run around as a cat,” Ana waits for the glint of an idea to sprout in the doctor’s mind, before she continues. “She’s much more agile as an eagle, we both are, really, but she’s convinced that a cat is faster. She’s also very stubborn.”
There’s a brief period of silence. Ana is gauging the witch’s reaction, who is blinking into the middle distance. Satisfied, she pats Angela on the shoulder.
“We will have to catch up more while I’m in town,” she says, deceptively kind. “I’ll bring Fareeha next time, we can have tea.” And then she smiles, turns on her heel and begins down the road. Angela stops her just outside of the witch’s lawn.
“Ana,” she calls, “out of curiosity … a black cat?” Ana, back towards the other woman, grins.
“Yes,” she calls back. Walks away.
Angela blinks once. Twice. Behind each flick of the eyelids is an image of the dutiful Fareeha Amari, running headlong into her mailbox.