#is Moira a little ooc maybe but shhhhh i love me a morally gray tal ginger nerd

[lepusrufus]

I was gonna throw this in a list of hcs but actually I wanna give it its own post bc I'm very normal about Widow and what's been done to her

I know the more widely accepted idea is that Widow has some inhuman strength and agility due to all the procedures she went through, but what if it's actually the opposite? Her blood flow is so slow her body barely gets the minimum amount of oxygen through it to survive. It makes her lethargic and chronically exhausted because she's always on that fine line between surviving and dead. It helps her keep deadly still when sniping, with great results as far at that goes, but on the flip side a burst of physical activity while running from one place to another on an assignment exerts her body to the point of agony. There's always a team of doctors and days upon days of physiotherapy waiting at Talon's hq, but that doesn't really erase the pain.

There's nanites flowing through her system but they don't really work. Not like they work for Angela or even Moira because they're not there to heal her, they're just there to keep her body from collapsing in on itself.

Her blood flow is so fucked she has pretty much zero temperature regulation and any environment that's too hot or too cold or spikes in temperature really screw with her. And she can barely even feel it until it's too late and she's either dizzy to the point of fainting or can barely move. (Yes I see the cinematic of her wearing basically nothing in the tundra. Yes I'm ignoring that detail and saying her uniforms are made to help with that thank you.)

Her lack of emotions was a carefully crafted mix of psychology work and meds specifically made for her that by this point keep her body going just as much as every other bit of "maintenance" she needs on a regular basis to survive. It doesn't always work. The human mind is great and complex and frankly she would sometimes prefer it not to be because whenever a strong emotion manages to sneak past all the walls built in her mind it leaves her frustrated and more exhausted than she already is. She can still make connections, have likes and dislikes, but anything particularly strong is like an unwelcome shock to an already fragile system.

But Talon doesn't really care because she's their perfect sniper and at the end of the day all the pain that comes as a consequence is only there to make her stronger.

And to top it off, Moira loathes how Ameliè turned out.

She didn't have that much of a hands on role in the making of Widowmaker, she's neither a psychologist nor a surgeon or any other kind of doctor that could do all of that, but she has been sort of an overseer to it. She's the one handling the regular procedures Widow needs to survive and the one taking note of how she handles one thing or another. And she hates all of it.

Moira used to be proud of Widowmaker, but after years of seeing basically a dead woman constantly walk the line of barely even alive, she realised that this is the complete opposite of what her idea of going against the limitations of the human body used to be. If Widow was to ever stop taking the fistful of daily meds or the medical procedures needed to keep her body going she would simply die, and even Moira can despise something that cruel.