angela, who’s lost her parents, both doctors, to war when she was just a child.
angela, who carries their legacy and treasures what little memories she has of them, how they taught her all life is precious, how you should always help if you can. “first, do no harm”.
angela, the bright, young (too young!) medical student, sleeping at her university’s science department, mingling with the engineering students, being excited about the newest advances in nanotech, all while cramming for medical exams.
angela, being contacted by overwatch because of her nanotech stream investigation, being offered to see her prototypes funded and developed. 25 years old, already head of surgery, and jumping at the chance to make the world better.
mercy, the newly minted overwatch agent, already cynical at how the cogs of the industrial military complex have twisted themselves around overwatch, and by proxy around her research as well. seeing her inventions patented, the propaganda machine twisting their names to make them sound aggrandizing and arrogant. clunky. the “valkyrie suit”. the “caduceus staff”.
“caduceus” - she fumes about it silently for weeks; the decorative grooves placed on her nanite conducting staff, the coiling twin snakes engraved onto the latest prototype of her flight suit. a horrible misnomer, a historical error, but - of course - one military-minded men would make.
mercy, seeing her investigation - who could help save millions of lives - be kept as a military secret, restricted to use by overwatch only.
mercy, putting it all aside during the omnic crisis, because even with the bureaucracy and the red tape she’s out there, in the field, helping people, saving lives. the field hospitals are frantic, but as she devotes herself to her work, everything else falls in the background. and when she’s called to accompany the strike team, she dons her combat medic outfit and puts on a pair of wings.
sometimes, she’ll remember. memories of tarp tents, antiseptic, iron and gunshots. her parents. at night, the hail of gunfire from the bastion units wakes her up, and she doesn’t sleep.
angela, seeing overwatch settling after the war, seeing her coworkers be hailed as heroes. wearing a military uniform still feels foreign to her, but she does it for the ceremonies. overwatch allows her to go public with her research. she tries to smile at interviews, but she’s clearly not as good at this game as jack.
they fly her to japan one day, and ask her to help a young man. he’s been bisected. she toils through her anger, and after her work is done she still has to endure seeing her commanding officer walk into her infirmary, congratulate her, and recruit the man as a covert overwatch agent - all while the nanites are still working to keep his belly from spilling out.
she rages. she cries. she damns the politics of war and peace-keeping, laughs and cries at her own hypocrisy - i’m a doctor, i’m a pacifist, i’m a woman of science. i’m a pawn in someone else’s game.
she does her job, continues her research, and keeps her resignation letter tidily on a locked drawer in her desk.
when the sky above the geneva base rains fire and brimstone, she wades through the rubble and smoke, because it’s what she can do.
and when she sees a dying man laying on the ground, hunched over by a figure who isn’t quite sure of what to do, she rushes to him, because helping people is what she does.
and when a broken voice pleads her to stop, she squeezes her staff tighter and stands her ground, even with a pulse rifle aimed at the back of her head. first, do no harm.
mercy having a few lines spawn about how overwatch maybe wasn’t like, all good? idk :/
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