Chapter Text
Of all the unpleasant and unexpected things to have come from joining Overwatch, becoming a semi-public figure has been the most impactful in Angela’s day to day life. It is not the worst of the ways in which her life veered far off course from what she hoped it would be, but it is upsetting, and frustrating, and not something she anticipated when Jack lured her in with the promise of funding her research. She is a private person, and always has been, and the pressure of being seen, of people thinking that they know her, of having others ascribe motivations to her actions that are wholly inaccurate, even when they are charitable, has been miserable. She feels she is never alone with herself, cannot shake the sense, even in private, that her actions will be scrutinized, that they are something that can be used in ways she does not intend.
It is not something she complains about, because she knows that there are so many worse things that came of her involvement in Overwatch—the impact on her research going forward, its inaccessibility and the ways in which it was twisted, the things she was a party to on missions, the effect of Overwatch on the planet as a whole, with her technology enabling them—and it seems selfish, in light of that, to say the attention made her unhappy.
But it did. Jack admitted to leveraging the goodwill her reputation engendered, and knowing what was done as a result feels violating.
And that, too, seems selfish to say, is not something she has ever been able to put into words without worrying that she is trivializing everything else that happened. Overwatch used her childhood, that trauma and fear, to orphan more children, and she knows that whatever horror and disgust that provokes in her pales in comparison to what the people directly affected are going through. It is wrong, is awful and it makes her feel so guilty for ever even having been in the spotlight, makes all the parts of her the world can see feel tainted.
There is so little of her that the rot that existed in Overwatch did not touch, so little left clean. They used her youth, her womanhood, her parents, her altruism, her ambition—all of it, and saw nothing wrong with that.
Worse, neither did she.
At the time it made her uncomfortable, the scrutiny, made her self-conscious and left her feeling occasionally exposed, but she justified it to herself, let herself believe what Jack and Ana and everyone who had a say in Overwatch’s propaganda machine tell her that it was worth it, to work with anything they could, because they could do so much more good in the world. She complained a little, privately, but she did not object like she should have, went along with what was asked of her.
This is not to say she did not question things—she did. There were so many things she knew were wrong, times she voiced her objections when it would have been far easier to be silent, but despite all her reservations she stayed, told herself that the people there were basically good and that she could sway them, could change things from the inside; the guilt of that she will carry with her for the rest of her life.
She wonders if people can see it on her, because she feels sometimes that she must ooze shame from her pores. No matter what she does to redeem herself, however many people she saves, she knows there is no undoing what was done, and there can be no anonymity when her face was used as it was.
She does not belong to herself. Or she, Angela, does, but Mercy, the amalgamation of those aspects of her that were put in the public eye, she has no control over. She knows that all of them have been picked apart by the public, by the media, by scholars trying to understand what happened in Overwatch, knows that this is not unique to her, and she can see that the others struggle with it too, with so many of them having renamed themselves, having transformed wholly into someone new, but still, she wonders if she feels it differently than they do.
Some of them are hiding from the law, some of them have changed their names out of shame, and some of them feel simply that they have transformed, and that it would be better to live as someone entirely new. These are all reactions she can understand, given what they went through, the ways in which they were all commodified, if to varying degrees. It makes sense, to want to redefine oneself, to need that anonymity to discover what lies beneath the persona one was force to project. It makes sense to want to escape.
What troubles Angela, however, is not something she can run from. It is the repulsion she feels when people look at her, the fear she has that people will see her, and know her, and use what they find to their own ends. Becoming a new, better version of herself will not allow her to outrun that, because the more authentically she exists the more there is of her to take, to twist into something it should not be. If she were to change her name, as Cole has, and live her life as the person she feels she would have become without Overwatch, that is just a new set of things for people to learn about her, new ways for them to define her. The thought makes her sick.
(And she has remade herself already, anyway, when she transitioned, so she knows that changing one’s presentation does not change how one feels about oneself, one’s identity. It can help, in some cases, but her present shame comes not from how she appears to others, but what she knows herself to be; in some ways, she thinks it the opposite of dysphoria.)
She hates to be seen, hates people thinking they know her. They do not. Even when they are kind, or empathetic, she feels she does not deserve it. They feel bad for Angela the orphan, Angela the well-meaning doctor who was led into things she did not know, Angela the hero who saved a person they loved but could not save herself.
None of those are her. Or—parts of them are, but they are mostly projection, are things people want to see, more than they are anything within her.
She knows the truth, knows she let that orphanhood be used to solicit donations to an organization which used them for things she could never support, knows that she did see much of what was wrong within Overwatch, but kept her objections private rather than going public, for fear of hurting her cause and her friends, knows that she is no victim. The woman they feel sympathy for is not real; the version who enabled so much suffering is.
Yet she cannot change the ways in which that woman feels real, to them. Whether people love or hate Mercy, she is like another person entirely outside of Angela’s control, and every little thing Angela does as herself is ascribed motivations based entirely on a fabrication. It seeps into every aspect of her life. When people work with her, she worries that they will believe she thinks herself better than them, that she has a God complex and thinks that what she does is more important, even when they are all united in trying to save lives. When people pass her on the street, she is so, so conscious of their eyes on her, wonders if each glance that lingers a moment too long is someone recognizing her, and knows that she cannot control how they feel towards her in that moment, worries that her very presence is a painful reminder of the instability Overwatch created, the vacuum of power it left. When she meets new people, she knows that she is at a disadvantage, that they know already so much of her life, and have formed opinions about her on that basis, while she knows nothing of them—and she cannot tell them they do not know her, because even when she does so, they do know how they feel about her, and that is enough.
When people love her—she does not let them.
It makes her sick, when people think that they do. They do not, cannot love her, because all that they know is a narrative they have told themselves. Even the people whom she has known in person could not possibly love her, not really, because there is no Angela to love, not really.
She made the mistake of being open about this once, and was reassured that she is lovable, that there are parts of her worth loving; she is not entirely sure she agrees, but that is not what she meant.
There really is no Angela. She was so young when Overwatch first set its sights on her that she does not know who she might have been without their influence. Years before she was formally recruited, Torbjörn was already talking with Jack about what an asset she might be, and it is impossible to tease out the ramifications of that, to pull apart the threads of pressure and power and find what lies beneath.
There is nothing more to her than what others project, and that she hates more than anything.
How could anyone love someone who does not exist?