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Angela is six years old, and the soldiers find her trying to put her parents back together.
The morning dawned bright and clear. The birds sang outside, only occasionally silenced by the bursts of artillery fire in the distance. Angela sat at the table in the kitchen, petting her mother’s old golden tomcat and carefully adding wings to a cartoon puppy in her coloring book. Conversation flowed above her head as her parents talked about the day ahead of them, chattering amicably about theorems and plot structure and a thousand other little, cheerful things.
Fear was smothering the city slowly, as the lines of the conflict shifted and fluctuated each day, slowly but surely edging towards Zurich. That fear dissolved in the face of the bright dispositions of the Ziegler household. Angela’s father was almost done with his latest novel; he had come up with the perfect twist, he told her mother as he spooned hot chocolate powder into Angela’s glass.
Until recently, a buzzing little robot had done that every morning, and always tickled Angela’s nose with one of its long arms. But that robot had disappeared from the breakfast table when the news started to show clip after clip of remorseless steel-gray shapes advancing on fragile human armies in countless theaters of war across the country.
Angela’s mother laughed, spooning cereal into her mouth with one hand and typing a few notes into a holopad with the other. She was a professor of mathematics at the local university, and was always consumed in one potential mathematical breakthrough or another.
Angela added a little horn to the cartoon puppy, quiet in the cheerful chaos of her home. She was happy that it was Friday, and her friends were going to come over the next day. Happy she would soon be off to school, though her teacher always looked so sad.
Maybe she would convince her mother to let her bring Sonig to school. That would cheer up her teacher for sure.
“Angie, schatzi, you’re going to get your bangs in your hot chocolate,” her mother said, dropping her spoon back into her bowl and leaning over to pick up a sparkly hair clip and clip Angela’s bangs back. She smiled at Angela, her eyes wide and friendly.
And then the world shattered.
Someone had found Angela’s paints and spread across the room, painting the floors in uneven splatters of crimson and dull maroon.
Her father had disappeared under a pile of wood and concrete. All she could see were his long, slender hands, one of them still gripping one of his old pens, the sentence he had been writing resting unfinished on one of the pages of his journal that had been torn and scattered across the floor.
Mommy won’t like the mess he made, Angela thought. But her mother did not spring to gather the torn pages and repair the journal with her characteristic crisis-averting behavior.
Her mother had come apart like one of the old dolls her grandmother kept in her attic, a scattered mess of detached limbs with a head that looked like something that squashed half of it.
Sonig was making low, mournful noises, like the time Angela accidentally locked him in the basement for the whole night. Her mother had been so furious that Angela wasn’t allowed to have friends over for two whole weeks. Instead, she had to spend the time with Sonig, making up for the fact that she had hurt him. Even if he was a cat, he was still a living creature, and every living creature deserved her respect, her mother had said. Sonig was a member of the family, and Angela had the same responsibility to him as her parents had to her.
Angela couldn’t seem to find the voice to cry out. She knew if she did, her parents would answer like they always did, but something choked the words in her throat. The loud, repetitive noises outside would have drowned out any words anyway. She couldn’t reach out to them; her legs were trapped under the remains of the table.
Sonig was trapped beside her, only his shoulders and his head poking out from beneath the table. His mournful sounds were getting softer. Angela didn’t know what to do, so she petted him gently, murmuring nonsense like her mother had taught her to. She petted Sonig until his sad noises were replaced by purring.
And then something happened, and Sonig wasn’t himself anymore. He was more like a stuffed animal, with glassy eyes and a still, silent body.
It took Angela what felt like forever to pull herself out from under the table. She tried to pull Sonig too, but he was cold, and touching him mad her stomach feel weird, so she murmured and apology and left him.
She crawled over to her mother. The noise outside had died down, fading into the distance, but she still could not bring herself to speak.
Someone had disassembled her mother. Her father should have been there to drive them to the hospital, where the doctors and nurses in blue and green could fit her back together, but her father wasn’t at his best either. So Angela began to work, doing her best to help her mother like the cartoons about veterinarians and doctors.
She tried to help her father too, to dig him out from under the rubble. She found her mother’s shattered holopad, with a few lines of incomprehensible mathematics looping over and over as it glitched. She placed the holopad by her mother. Her mother could finish the formula when she got better.
Two days pass before the soldiers find her.
“Almost done with the final sweep.”
The words drifted in through the gaping window that had been torn in the kitchen. Angela was huddled against the intact kitchen wall, her eyes on the flies that were circling around Sonig. Sonig used to chase flies. He would catch them and- yuck!- eat them. But these didn’t seem to bother him.
She had been learning English since she was a baby, because her mother believed in getting running start in education. So the words weren’t exactly alien, but it was strange to hear someone walking down the street and calling out so loudly in English.
Maybe they could help her parents. She had tried, she had done her very best, but they were still lying there. Like Sonig. Everything smelled awful and there was a gnawing pit in Angela’s stomach; she felt half ravenous and half sick. But it was thirst that bothered her the most. She could no longer stand up to check on her parents, she had to crane her neck from her position against the wall, because her legs would not support her.
Heavy footsteps crunched by outside. She opened her mouth to call out, but the words stuck in her throat. She shuddered, wrapping her arms around herself and trying to speak. The pounding noise of the great rolling monstrosities kept echoing through her head, even though she thought it had faded away days ago.
She held her hands over her ears and scrunched her eyes shut, and opened her mouth as wide as she could to scream.
It was a low, pathetic noise that came out.
At first, Jack Morrison thought it was a cat.
He stopped for a moment, cocking his head to listen. His hearing was better than the average person’s, as superior situation awareness was one of the first things the scientists who pioneered the Soldier Enhancement Program worked into the genetics of those they experimented on. But he had spent the last week fighting Bastion units, and even with protective gear the noise was enough to set anyone’s ears ringing for days.
“What is it?” Gabriel snapped, glancing back at Jack.
Jack held up his hand for a moment, gesturing for Gabriel to be quiet. He heard the sound again, a low, feeble noise. “Did you hear that?”
Gabriel shook his head. “We’ve swept these streets a dozen times, Morrison. All that’s left here is corpses.” His tone was weary, and the dark circles under his eyes spoke of the constant state of alert they had been operating at for days. As super soldiers, they were more equipped to deal with that than the average man, and that was why it was them out making the last checks of the nights, but every person had their breaking point.
“You’re probably right,” Jack said, but he walked towards the sound anyways.
“I think it might be a cat.”
“Cats aren’t in our orders,” Gabriel snapped. “You’re going to get yourself shot, dawdling out here.”
“Since when have you cared about orders?” Jack shot back, pushing a chunk of brick aside to slip into the house where the noise came from through a hole in the wall. Strike Commander Reyes was technically his superior officer, and in a real combat situation, he obeyed him without question, but beneath that discipline was familiarity. He and Gabriel had known each other for a long time, and the hardships they had endured together only seemed to make that time longer. Some days it was hard to believe that he had a life before the military.
“What was that?” Jack’s earpiece crackled to life with Ana’s voice.
“Jack is being insubordinate,” he heard Gabriel grumble back as he cleared some rubble from a doorway, and stepped into what had probably once been the kitchen of house. There was more said, the other members of their strike team weighing in with poorly-concealed exhaustion dressed up as cheer, but Jack didn’t catch the words.
The now-familiar smell of rot assaulted his senses. Not too long ago it might have made him gag and recoil, but the last year had exposed him to more carnage than he had ever imagined possible. His eyes passed over the two decomposing shapes on the floor, as his mind quietly filed them away with all the rest.
Then there was that low, mournful sound again.
He realized with a second glance what he had assumed to be a twisted bit of rubble in the shadows was a little figure. A child.
He stepped closer, turning his recon light on the form, and caught a glimpse of blonde as the child leaned forward, picking up a piece of one of the rotting forms and… adjusting it. Moving it closer, as if trying to fit it back together.
The sight made his stomach twist in a way it had not in a long time.
The child was staring up at him. Large, fever-bright eyes stared up at him from sunken sockets, and chapped lips opened to let out another pathetic, faint little mewling sound.
Her dress had at one time been white, or maybe pink, but like the rest of her, it was filthy. Her hair, shining almost white in the light from his hands, was long, and hung at her shoulders in a matted length. Her bangs were clipped up with a jaunty pinky hairclip.
Jack knelt instinctively, holding out his hand. For a moment, he fumbled with the bits of German he knew- there had hardly been time for a crash course before they had been sent out. “Hello,” he said in a quiet, soothing tone. “My name is Jack. You’re safe now.” The language felt clunky and unwieldy on his tongue, and the girl’s stare did not waver.
“Morrison? What’s going on in there?” Gabriel’s voice asked in his ear.
He turned away for a moment, and spoke quietly. “There’s a child in here. She must have been missed in the other sweeps to find survivors. She’s in bad shape.”
“Jesus. I’ll comm the medical team,” Gabriel said.
“Good,” Jack said, and refocused his attention on the girl.
Her lips were trembling, and her eyes were wide with unshed tears. He moved a little closer, heedless of the muck he was moving through. She didn’t shrink back or turn away. She just stared at him.
“What’s your name?” he asked, trying again for German.
She giggled. The sound was almost alarming.
“A-Angela,” she said. Her voice was raspy and hoarse with disuse. “You… you don’t speak my language very good.” The sentence was in hesitant and slightly accented, but perfectly understandable English. “My mother says the more languages you know, the more friends you can make.”
“I guess I didn’t pay enough attention in school,” he said, forcing himself to smile at her. “You’re safe now. Me and my friends will take you to-“ To what? Her family? Likely they were the decomposing corpses. “To a safe place.”
Her eyes widened. “I’m not supposed to go anywhere with strangers. I— I have to stay here! My parents will be angry if I don’t.”
“Your parents would understand,” Jack said. “You’re in danger here. It’s the job of people like me to get kids like you out of danger.”
“Really?” Her shaky little voice sounded skeptical. “You’re… American? Why are you here?” The last syllable caught in her throat, and she started to cough. For a few moments, the entirety of her small body was wracked with coughs.
Jack set down his pack carefully, and drew out his canteen. He pressed the button on te top, and the device came to life, the glowing blue screen showing the amount and cleanliness of the water in it. He held it out to her. “Drink.”
For a moment he could see caution warring with thirst in her eyes, as her gaze darted from the canteen to his face and back. Thirst won. She snatched the canteen from him. In her hands, it looked almost comically large. She struggled with it for a moment, before figuring out how it worked and taking a long drink.
“We’re here to fight the Omnics,” he said, once she had put the canteen down. “And to help people.”
Angela looked at him again, taking in his uniform and the weaponry he was carrying. “C-Can you help my parents? I’ve been trying, but… but… I don’t think it’s working.”
Jack’s heart dropped in his chest. None of his training had prepared him for a conversation like this. He was better at talking than Gabriel or Ana, better at diplomacy, but that didn’t translate into better at telling shell-shocked little kids that their parents were dead.
“I’m afraid not, Angela,” he said. “Your parents are gone.”
“B-But they’re right here!” Angela’s little voice rose to a shriek before it broke, and she started coughing again. When she stopped, there were tears in her eyes. “They’re dead, aren’t they?”
Anything he could think to say only sounded callous, but apparently his expression said everything.
She began to sob. It wasn’t the short, wailing sound that Jack had grown familiar with looking after his younger brothers and sister. It was long, soundless, wrenching sobs that tore out of her painfully. She hugged her arms over her chest, as if trying to hold herself together.
When Jack reached out his arms, she clung to him immediately, pressing her face into his armor. He hugged her gingerly, and then more tightly when she embraced him back. He should stop and examine her for injuries before he moved her, but he could not bear the thought of her in this room with the moldering corpses of her family any longer.
He picked her up. She was almost frighteningly easy to lift, and her only response was to wrap her arms around his neck. Aside from that, she was a dead weight in his arms, still crying softly.
When Jack stepped out of the house, Gabriel and Ana were waiting. They had their backs to the door and started when he stepped out, both reaching for weapons for a moment before realizing it was him.
It had been one hell of a day.
“Ana,” Jack said. “Glad you made it down from your perch alright.”
She flashed him the ghost of a smile. “I always do, Jack. I see you’ve been picking up strays.”
Jack shrugged. “Regular troops must have missed her in the sweep. The rest of her family is…” He glanced down to the girl. Her eyes were shut, but she didn’t seem to be asleep. He shook his head.
Gabriel checked his comm. “Medical team is on their way. They swore up and down that they had already evacuated every survivor, but it looks like they did a sloppy job.” He spat into the dirt.
“One little girl is all too easy to miss,” Ana said sadly. “It’s good you found her, Jack.” She leaned over to look at the girl. “What’s your name, little one?”
“A-Angela,” came the weak murmur. Angela’s grip on Jack’s neck tightened, and she buried her head in his shoulder.
As they sat and waited for the medical team, Jack sat Angela down for a moment, and used a bit of water from his canteen and a scrap of bandage to wipe the blood from her hands and face. Ana prodded her gently, trying to get an idea if she were badly injured. Angela tolerated these ministrations for a little while, before crawling back into Jack’s arms and clinging to his neck again.
She did not want to let go, even when the medical team came. She began to scream in a broken, hoarse voice whenever anyone tried to pry her away from Jack.
So he stayed with her. His duties were over for the day, anyway. On the morrow it would be back into the fight, but he could spare an evening for a girl who was clinging to one shred of familiarity when she had lost everything else.
Angela is seventeen years old, and Jack Morrison wants her to join Overwatch.
Angela stared out the window of her apartment, out onto the quiet streets. Switzerland rebuilt quickly, in the years following the Omnic Crisis, but though the physical scars of the conflict fade with each year, the wounds of the collective psyche of the country still show. Overwatch saved the day— but there is a lingering dread in everyone’s minds. The looming thought that in the world they lived in, the next disastrous global conflict had to be right around the corner. Peace still seems fragile, almost farcical.
For Angela, the nightmares faded. When she was younger, she hardly ever slept. Now, she could sleep most nights, though she still wakes up with the sound of Bastions’ artillery fire in her ears. Sometimes, in a moment of grogginess, it felt like her hands are still sticky with blood, and she has to wash them a dozen times before they feel clean.
F
These are things that as a medical professional she knew she should talk to someone about. She would probably be diagnosed with PTSD— not at all uncommon in her generation, in the children who grew up shuffled from refugee camp to refugee camp. But a diagnosis like that might hinder her ability to do the work she had dedicated her life to, and… it was a matter of pride, too, though it was difficult for her to admit that to herself.
Some people called her a prodigy, and she knew she did have a certain amount of natural talent. One didn’t make it through medical school at such a young age without a certain amount of innate skill. But mostly it felt like fear driving her, not genius. She burned through public education as fast as she could, working herself to the bone out of fear that the world would come crashing down again.
There had been no family to attend her highschool graduation; no mother or father to cry about how fast she had grown up, or offer words of wisdom for taking flight into the real world. But Jack Morrison was there, quietly, and had taken her aside afterwards and told her how proud of her he was with a sheepish smile on his face. Somehow, the soldier who rescued her had managed to stay in her life; she was quietly grateful for that, because he understood, in a way that nobody who had claimed guardianship of her ever had. She had gotten herself emancipated as soon as she was legally able, but sometimes when he checked in on her, it felt like having a parent again. Even if he wasn’t completely comfortable in that role.
She had gone through medical school just as quickly; the youngest person to ever receive her license to practice in Switzerland. Her teachers praised her for her ideas, and she started her first forays into the field of nanobiology.
It felt like time was always on her heels, that another crisis would come and snatch her life away. Take away her ability to make a difference, and leave her work unfinished. Her work pointless.
“Have you thought about my offer?” Jack asked.
His voice always brought her back to that room. Strangely enough, it wasn’t as bad an association as it might have been. That night, he had saved her. That night, he had been safety.
Now… he was something else. He was asking her to jump back into danger.
To do something against her moral code.
It was so hard to say no to him. When she was a child, after he saved her, she had dreamed of joining Overwatch. She dreamed of swooping down and saving people, just like Jack and Ana and all the other heroes whose names were trumpeted from one end of the world to the other after the end of the Omnic Crisis.
And then she got older, and realized what Overwatch had become. Just another global military power, a bastion of ambition and overconfidence, that was probably leading the world towards another disaster.
Not that the organization didn’t have noble intentions— she had a lot of respect for Strike Commander Morrison and some of its other leaders— but it still ran on the premise that Might made Right. It still contributed to militarization, and war. In the Omnic Crisis, it had been necessary, but it was outstaying its welcome.
She couldn’t pretend that the more naïve part of her didn’t thrill at the idea of being the hero she had always wanted to be.
Jack came up beside her. He was dressed in civilian clothing instead of his Overwatch uniform, which was unusual; she had hardly seen him out of uniform before. He didn’t have much time for civilian activities. Generally when he visited her, it was between legs of a trip to somewhere else where he was needed.
Still, this visit felt more like business than any of the others.
Overwatch wanted her.
“Is this why you kept an eye on me, Jack?” she asked. “So you could recruit me later on?”
The words were bitter on her tongue.
Jack’s eyes widened. He really could be an American stereotype, even now; a corn-fed, blue-eyed, muscled mama’s boy who tended to see the best in everyone. His public persona seemed to ring true, though there were edges of cynicism there that Angela had noticed before. She wouldn’t put it quite beyond him to maintain a connection with her because she seemed useful.
“You know that isn’t why—“ he stopped, and shook his head. His face had ‘hurt’ written all over it.
“You know I respect you a lot,” she said, turning away from him. She couldn’t quite meet his eyes. “You know I owe you a lot. You saved my life, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to repay that. But… please don’t ask me to join your war.” She crossed her arms over her chest defensively. “I’ve told you this before. I respect you, but joining Overwatch would be betraying my own values. I’m helping people here, Jack. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do with my life.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” he said.
“Hm,” she said dismissively, her eyes focused on the Zurich street outside.
“Angela. Look at me.”
Jack’s voice took on a very… fatherly tone. He would probably be embarrassed if she drew his attention to it. She turned to look at him reluctantly.
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“You saved my life! You’ve been my hero since I was six. I owe you a lot. So please—“
“I was doing my job, Angela,” he said, and she could see a hint of the steel in his personality that wasn’t often exposed to the public. “I’m happy as hell that I saved you, but it was my job. I wasn’t going above and beyond. You don’t owe me anything, and I don’t want you to join Overwatch because you feel indebted to me.”
“I’m not going to—“ she started, but he cut her off.
“I want you to join Overwatch so you can help more people.”
She stared at him uncertainly.
“Your research into nanobiology has already been revolutionary, but it could make so much more of an impact in that places that Overwatch goes. Here, in Switzerland, the recovery from the Crisis is almost complete. Other places, those wounds haven’t even begun to heal, or they’ve festered. I don’t need to tell you that conflict and disease kills millions. If you join Overwatch, you can help heal those wounds. You can bring your technology to the places that need it most. In Zurich, your technology is remarkable. On Overwatch ops, it would be miraculous.”
She couldn’t pretend she hadn’t thought about it. She even had a design somewhere, the half-thought out idea of a staff that could channel her regenerative technology more quickly and easily in situations like emergency relief and even combat… but…
“You would be giving people the chance to live that they won’t get otherwise,” Jack said. “We have a lot of soldiers in Overwatch. A lot of scientists too, and they’re pretty smart. But we have no doctors like you. No one so dedicated to healing people.”
The way he talked about her made Angela feel faintly uncomfortable. The way his eyes shone, she knew he believed every word he said. He genuinely believed in her altruism, in her passion, and wanted to… wanted to help her.
It made her feel like a fraud.
“I’m so afraid, Jack,” she said, after the weight of his optimistic gaze seemed unbearable. “I still see them in my dreams. I can hardly remember those images when I’m awake, but when I sleep…” She shook her head. She always dreamed of her mother’s flickering datapad, endlessly repeating an unfinished equation, and the pages of her father’s novel spread across the floor.
“I won’t pretend that it isn’t scary. There are things that we face that still terrify me, and I’m ancient for a soldier,” Jack said, giving her a knowing smile. “But you wouldn’t be alone, if you ever entered in a combat situation. You would have a team with you, protecting you.”
He didn’t understand. It wasn’t combat that frightened her. It was betraying her morals, it was realizing that all along she had only fought so hard to save people because she was terrified of death. She didn’t deserve praise from him, or anyone. She didn’t deserve the sort of power that Overwatch could hand her, because she was just as corruptible as everyone else.
But she would be saving more people.
That rung true, and she could not ignore it. She was fine, isolated away in her expensive hospital, living the life of a prized doctor and medical researcher. But was that really living up to her potential? Was that the work she wanted to be doing for the rest of her life?
She could not leave anything unfinished.
So she trusted Jack, and took another leap into the future.
“I’ll join Overwatch.”