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"What a pretty baby. Look at her eyes. Oh, she's so sweet. She looks like an angel."
"Let's name her Angela then, dear. It fits her perfectly."
And so, Angela Zeigler got her name. And she grew to fit it nicely, silky blond hair in a cute ponytail and wide baby blues made her the prettiest child among her peers. Even when puberty hit and she started breezing through classes, proving smarter and more innovative than her parents ever expected her to be.
She liked wearing pale colors, actually, so she didn't mind being called 'angel' rather than her actual name. She came to like it, in fact. It was cute.
Then she started attempting her doctorate and people called her by name. Usually her last.
Like she needed a title to exist outside her bright hair and baby blues.
She drew people's attention, powerful people, straight-up leaders of global forces. Overwatch officials approached her with delightful offers, and who was Angela, who just started seperating her name from her face at age seventeen, to decline?
Somehow nobody batted an eye at the literal teenager falling into the medic ranks of Overwatch.
It was scary. No one else was under twenty there, not that she knew of. Hell, the youngest she could find was some twenty-three-year-old in comms, apart from her own ninteen years. She socialized wide and warm, and few were those who made the connection between her looks and her name. And that was amazing enough that she didn't mind being a bit scared.
It was only a few months, maybe seven or eight, before she found another teenage agent. Freshly recruited, scruffy, sloppy and with an eye always over his shoulder, Jesse McCree was the exact opposite of what Angela had hoped for in the peer department. She seriously contemplated falling to her knees and praying for an agent her age who was tidy and confident in their ability to survive in Overwatch, and certainly not the gang boy that looked all too much like a hair trigger in a shaky hand.
Of course, life is messy, so Angela was assigned to his medical overview and, in all honesty?
The look mr. McCree gave her when he walked in the medbay to find a child like himself, one that looked like an angel no less, remains to this day the moment when Angela hated her appearence the most.
Should've worn black, she thought, going through the examination.
Shouldn't have been smiling, as she questioned him on past injuries and sickness.
Shouldn't have even been waiting for him, as she found that this boy couldn't answer her questions for how lost he was, for how he wasn't familiar with the terminology, for how he mentioned in passing, like it was normal, that so far the only treatment he's had had been don't tire yourself and if you die, you died.
The 'mr.' before his name dropped quick. Neither of them liked it. 'McCree' became 'Jesse'. 'The messy gang boy' somehow turned into 'friend'.
Angela never admitted that the first thing that drew her to him was pity.
It was fine, though, because by the time they were that close, they were both in their twenties, so she wasn't just as scared. Jesse became Blackwatch's best shot and Angela became Overwatch's best field medic and experimental nanobiolologist. Who, incidentally, wasn't supposed to know quite that much about Blackwatch.
And that's the thing, isn't it? Everyone trusted Angela, she was one of the few they saw when they thought they were gonna die. They told her things. Some babbled mindlessly under medication or out of shock, and Angela was always there to listen.
If it weren't for Commander Reyes, head of the black ops himself, Angela might've thought she had the single most intel on the entirety of Overwatch.
There was also the other reason people would trust her, a whole nother type of intimacy. That couldn't be reason enough, however, as was proven by the case of McCree and the infamous 'Horse Saviour' T-Shirts Incident, followed by the more subtle 'It Didn't Hurt Because She Had Slowfall' Incident.
People trust angels. Angela wore white scrubs for base-stationed work, and her leisure clothes were mostly soft colored and modest. When filing for a callname, she figured 'angel' was just too obvious, got lost because what the hell else was she supposed to file?
It was Torbjorn who suggested it, actually, when they were brainstorming about it, "People see you when they think they'll die. Some are on our side and survive, some are not and don't. Still, wouldn't they all be asking for the same thing? Mercy? Does 'Merciful' sound good to you?"
It didn't. It was too long, the spelling was often mistaken. Mercy, though. Mercy was good. Mercy was plead for in one's dying breath. And Mercy could decide who was given it, and who was denied.
She designed the Valkyrie suit to be lightweight and white, with wings as stylised as they'd go.
One of her friends, a pilot, got lost in a test flight, and Mercy was pissed at the loss of such a young life. Lena was fifteen.
It wasn't two months later that one Genji Shimada got dropped in her hands.
Some parts of him were missing as if bitten off, some with third-degree burns, some seemed cut off. The briefing later identified only two puncture wounds, but the rest was left unexplained. Some flesh bits seemed stabbed, but who'd stab a burned man?
A fuzzy light kept his shoulder from bleeding out. It was green and not defined enough to have a shape. When Mercy started to work on the shoulder, the light trembled, retreated and disappeared, but not before scraping her gloved fingers.
It... almost looked like a snake? Did it just bite her?
Genji survived. Mercy built him into a weapon. Somewhere in between that, Lena survived.
Jesse lost his hand. From his drugged mumbling Mercy gathered enough to figure he had had to get out of handcuffs, quick, and he had to empty an entire clip on trying to shoot his own thumb off. He succeeded, of course, but is was sloppy enough that none of his left fingers made it.
Mercy saw the fall happening about that same time.
Overwatch was collapsing on itself. Some protocols didn't make sense. Commander Morrison was distant, Commander Reyes more so. Reinhardt and Torbjorn were torn between the two, more stubborn about sticking to each other's side than figuring out what was wrong with their Commanders, their friends.
Genji left. So did Jesse, who became McCree again.
Amari and Lacroix were dead.
During a late afternoon briefing with the other medics and doctors, Mercy called a break and ran to get some snacks for them all, looking for an excuse to stretch her legs.
She'd barely made it to the canteen before the upper floor exploded.
She had nothing to work with - no Valkyrie suit to make her faster, no Caduceus staff to heal with. She ran on foot to the room she'd been in just minutes prior - found it under tons of cement.
Still, the part of the building that wasn't affected was full of people, many of whom were stupid enough to go looking with her instead of evacuate like the more sensible majority.
Mercy fell to her knees and weeped like a child, pulling her hair, digging her nails in her arms. She was dragged away by Winston, vaulted over his shoulder like a sack of sand. On his other shoulder, Tracer was screaming, grasping desperately on his shirt.
It took seven hours for the rest of the base to come down, and once there was nothing threatening to fall, they were cleared for inspection and search for survivors. In that time, Mercy had managed to scrape together a mockup of her staff, same basic principle, way more unstable. She found the remains of her fellow doctors, called the inspectors and looked elsewhere. She found Commander Reyes' body, so distorted she was too close when she realised it was human.
She wanted to claw her own throat out. But she couldn't, someone might hear.
Instead she put her hand close to where Reyes' chest would've been, had it not caved in on itself, and deployed her excuse of a staff. It was more of a hand device. It glowed, trickled nanobots down on Reyes, then stopped.
Mercy never found Merrison's body. She hoped it was for the best - had it been half as destroyed as Reyes', she would've given up completely.
Their funerals were too official. Like Ana's, thousands of people were present, millions more were watching the broadcast. Lacroix at least got that, Mercy mused; his funeral had the decent humanity of privacy because he had never seen battle from his communications post.
Mercy exited the stage of heroes with dignity. She volunteered at a lab, found the research lengthy and impractical. None of the doctors there would ever see their work in action.
And that's the thing: they were all doctors. Mercy was too used to working with medics, communicated easier with field slang and trusted them to assist her risks enough that she could employ them; these doctors here couldn't imagine taking risks, would rather test extensively to be sure they saved someone's future than try to work with a present.
Angela left that too. Took to volunteering in the streets. But without a team keeping an eye out for her, she had too many stitches to do on herself to worry about the others.
She stopped wearing pale at work. The blood showed too easily on pale.
Then the Valkyrie suit became the work clothes, work clothes became leisure getup and she couldn't pinpoint the time when taking the wings and armor off the Valykrie was all the comfort she needed to sleep, but it's what happened.
She kept in touch with her old family. Winston, Lena, Reinhardt, even Torbjorn on holidays when he remembered family outside of blood. She got a few mails from McCree.
In Oasis, she found sponsors willing to give her the tech she needed to progress her own work, improve her equipment, finish some of her old research. But she got out of the city fast - too much time spent there and it'd be hard to leave without looking like she abandoned them. And she had no plans of staying in a city with minimal work for her.
The outskirts of Oasis' desert were brimming with lovely villages. Great for vacation if you can stand the heat. Too close to Oasis to warrant a different hospital or medic for them. Too seperated by the desert to make use of Oasis' resources.
Just on the line of helpless. Just where Mercy could work to her best while keeping an eye on the latest tech, whenever someone drove to Oasis.
She eyed Winston's recall message with a scowl. It was a bad idea. But she missed her family, and they have their trust. She's never relaxed without trusted people around her.
She was so tired.
(She tapped the N.)
She'd like to let a bit of tension go, if even for a bit.
(She tapped the Y.)
(This went on for several hours before she turned her comm off altogether.)