A/N: This is my first attempt at writing Overwatch fanfiction. I guess it's an art swap with hanghr on tumblr (there's a link to her bolg on my profile). She drew the initial art for Pharah's and Mercy's character designs and came up with the original concept and after discussing it for a while, we decided I would write it out as a full AU while she draws art for it. I'll link new pictures for it on my page as she finishes them. It's also my first attempt at writing Pharmercy so I hope ya'll like it.
Unlike her mother, Fareeha Amari didn't much care to associate herself with Overwatch. She supposed their intentions were noble enough, but the group of justice-orientated mercenaries was very secretive, very exclusive in who they recruited, and even the people they did business with were often left in the dark, given information on a need-to-know basis. That was not how Fareeha preferred to work when her ship was involved with transporting goods from one continent to the other.
For decades, her mother had worked for Overwatch exclusively, transporting goods of all shapes and sizes - most of it contraband that would have gotten her thrown in prison for five lifetimes if she was ever caught trying to bring it into some of the ports she had. To say that it had put a strain on their relationship was a bit of an understatement, especially given the generations of reputation their family had built as peerless sailors. After her mother's untimely death, Fareeha had made it very clear to the higher-ups of Overwatch that she would be involved in no illegal activity, and they largely ignored she existed for years, effectively cutting all their ties with her family. She supposed it was because an organization as big as Overwatch had an obscene amount of resources and could get any random sailor to transport their military-grade weapons from one country to another by throwing enough money at them. It was a loss of client-el that Fareeha did not regret in the slightest.
So, imagine her surprise when she was contacted by Overwatch's leader, a Jack Morrison, while in port in Germany for a few weeks between transport jobs. She had met the stone-faced American man over a few drinks in a pub. The negotiations started off pretty rocky, considering the first thing he brought up was now much he missed her mother's expertise. Fareeha had simply glared at him and given him an equally cold "I'm not my mother" before they began to discuss the details of what he wanted.
Morrison needed an assortment of weapons - perfectly legal ones, he assured her - transported from their base in Eichenwald to a small port in Australia. The sensitive issue was that those seas were plagued by a pirate gang known as the Junkers, and it was incredibly dangerous to traverse. He claimed he didn't want to send someone as inexperienced as his usual transporters to waters that deadly, so he was reaching out to someone who had experience dealing with and avoiding pirates. Namely, her and her crew. That's what he said, at least - though Fareeha personally thought it was more likely he couldn't find anyone stupid enough to cross paths with the Junkers. Fareeha and the crew of her ship, the Raptora, had locked horns with Talon pirates before and came out alive, but pirates were something she would never go out of her way to deal with. She almost told to shove it up his ass, but when he offered her more money than her last five jobs combined, she begrudgingly agreed to it.
That was two weeks ago, and to say they were off course was being generous. Almost immediately after leaving Germany, they hit one of the roughest storms she had seen all year - a sign of things to come, Fareeha was sure. It was nothing she hadn't dealt with a hundred times in the past, but it was enough to set them back several days. From where she was sitting at her desk in her quarters, Fareeha resisted the urge to sigh. Every second she was on this trip, she became more and more doubtful about it. She hadn't wanted to get involved in Overwatch and it's affairs, and even nature itself seen to be telling her that she was making a grave error.
As if reading her thoughts, she could suddenly hear an abnormal amount of activity and commotion on the deck above her. At least a dozen sets of footstep were sounding overhead and a lot of shouting accompanied the frenzy of motion. Deciding it was probably in her best interest to check up on it, Fareeha stood up, throwing her black gold-trimmed captain's coat over the white shirt and tie she was already wearing.
Upon reaching the deck, she could see a gathering of about thirteen deckhands - essentially her entire upper deck staff - standing around something towards the center of the ship. Ignoring how annoyed that made her when they were already far behind schedule, she moved toward them to see what the excitement was about.
As she approached the crowd and they quickly parted ways to allow space for their captain to pass through, Fareeha's eyes widened in shock at what the source of the activity was. Lying in the middle of the deck, tangled in the remnants of a net that a few bold crew members had attempted to cut her out of, was a creature that the young captain had only ever heard stories of. It was a mermaid and a strikingly beautiful one at that. It was like something straight out of a children's book, with long platinum blonde hair that fell to its shoulders in wet tendrils and striking blue eyes the same color as the ocean it had just been pulled from. The tail spread out behind the mermaid was a mix of golden and orange hues that shimmered in the sunlight. The golden scales even ran up the torso a bit, covering the gill slits just below its breasts on both sides of her body. Fins stuck out at various points of the creature's body - most dominantly the large dorsal fin that ran almost the entire length of its back. Identical fins stuck out where its ears would if been if it was a person, and at the elbows.
However, the pretty face and a colorful tail were where the appeal ended, for the mermaid's body language was anything but soft. It was wired, tense, razor-sharp teeth bared as a quiet growl seemed to be coming from the back of its throat. The mermaid's dorsal fin was flared upward, trying to make itself look bigger. It supported its upper body with its hands, glaring at all of the surrounding humans at once, challenging all of them to come anywhere nearby. When Fareeha finally made it closer to the creature, its blue eyes snapped to her own brown eyes, and there was nothing there but aggression. The captain took another step toward the creature, and the growl evolved into a hiss as it seemed to recoil slightly, the bloodlust almost immediately replaced by unease.
In a way, she found the display a bit disappointing - she had heard stories about mermaids, about how they could supposedly communicate with people, how they could be related to and experienced sentience and some degree of self-awareness, but this one in front of her was nothing more than an animal - a scared one, granted, but an animal. And if there was one thing Fareeha had learned with dealing animals, it was to recognize when one was agitated, and this mermaid was miles past that point. She finally tore her gaze away from the defensive glare of the mermaid and back to a group of the men and women standing around.
"So, what exactly were you doing while I was below deck for ten minutes?" Her eyebrow was arched. "You all have much better things to be doing than harassing the local wildlife, don't you think?"
"With all due respect, Captain," one of the men grunted in response, "it is a mermaid."
"I don't care what the hell it is," she snapped back, "it doesn't belong on my deck." As Fareeha glanced back at the aquatic crypid on the deck mere feet from her, she began to remember the much darker side of the stories she had heard of merfolk: sirens who lured entire ships to their deaths with mirages and beautiful songs, mermaids and mermen who drowned people for pleasure, monsters who resented humanity and would do anything they could to bring death to humans they found on the seas. Hell, even captive mermaids had been known to kill their owners through the power of their voices and their inhuman beauty. There was absolutely no part of her that wanted such a dangerous creature on her ship, let alone in close proximity to almost her entire crew.
"Should we take it to that tank on the lower deck?" another voice asked.
"Absolutely not," Fareeha snapped in response, horrified that he was suggesting they actually keep the mermaid. "I want that thing thrown back in the water where it belongs. We still have several weeks on this trip and I'm not going to keep a dangerous animal we know nothing about on board." The only response the captain got from her crew after that was silence and a very heavy atmosphere that made it all too obvious to her that none of them agreed with the call she was making. "If any of you have something to say, I'm always open to suggestions," she deadpanned.
Finally, one of the women in the group sighed. "Captain, it's just that mermaids are as rare and as valuable as they come. People pay millions for them. We'd be-"
"We have a job to be doing," Fareeha reminded her sharply, as her harsh eyes skimmed over the entire crowd of sailors who were definitely neglecting their duties to stand around gawking at the mermaid. She didn't even want to know how much time had already been wasted by the sheer effort of spotting, netting and hauling the thing on board in the first place. "We don't have time to mess around with something like this," Fareeha continued heatedly. "We're already running behind schedule and you all have duties you are supposed to be performing right now that are far more important than talking about selling a mermaid."
"These things are menaces," another man spoke up. "There's no telling how many sailors have died at the hands of creatures like that one."
Fareeha's eyebrow arched. "And that makes me want it on my ship even less."
"That's why we should take it from the ocean," he persisted. "It's one less killer plaguing the seas. At least in a tank, it won't be hurting anyone."
Pondering over his words, Fareeha looked back at the mermaid once more. It was still staring directly at her, teeth still bared, body still poised like it was prepared to strike her at any second. In fact, the creature was so tense that she was certain that the only reason it hadn't tried to make a break for the edge of the ship was because of the sheer amount of people surrounding it. It had nowhere to go - it was simply cornered, and so was reacting in the only way a cornered animal knew how to. Still...it hadn't actually hurt anyone yet. Of course, the captain was more than aware of the reputation merfolk had, but it was just that: a reputation. Fareeha had never seen any of the attacks herself, she merely heard accounts from far-off sailors and their tales, and nobody really knew where fact ended and fiction began.
And even if they were true, was it fair to hold this one mermaid accountable for the morbid actions of others of its kind? As far as they knew, this one was completely harmless. Even if it was about as intelligent as an animal, it was still wild - it had spent its entire life in the ocean. To take it from something like that, condemning it to a boundary of four glass walls for the rest of its life based on stories and legends, seemed cruel.
Even so, Fareeha wasn't entirely opposed to the idea. It might not have been fair, but she'd be lying to herself if she didn't admit that she was curious about the creature. This would be the only opportunity she'd ever have in her life to see a mermaid, to see how it swims, how it interacts to environments around it, how it feeds. They weren't going to touch land for more than a few hours for a least a month. That was a long time to observe the mermaid in her very limited free time. She looked back to the cryptid's expressive blue eyes, as two of the small fins growing out the side of its tail slapped down against the scales with a tiny smacking sound.
Finally, Fareeha nodded. "Alright. But I don't want anyone going near it for at least a full day. We still have no idea what it's capable of."
It happened so quickly that Fareeha barely processed it. As a deckhand reached for the mermaid's arm to restrain it, it twisted its entire torso with the speed of a snake and sunk its mouth full of razor-sharp teeth into his leg. The man let out a howl of pain and the mermaid, as quickly as it lashed out, recoiled heavily as if he had struck it across the face. It allowed its torso to rest on the wooden deck as it stared at the person it had attacked, blue eyes wide. The dorsal fin was lying flat against the mermaid's back, ears tilted downward as it made its entire body sink lower to the floor. In the next instant, three men had jumped on the creature's back, one of them pushing the mermaid's head down against the hard ground cheek-first while another man grabbed both of its wrists and held them behind its back. The mermaid writhed under them and made a few distressed whimpers from deep within its throat, but had no means to fight back against them.
Fareeha's lips pursed as she watched the struggle unfold, brown eyes slowly shifting from the mermaid to the gaping wound on her sailor's leg, then back to the mermaid again. She no longer had a legitimate argument to make in defense of the animal; it had just sealed its own fate in that small act of violence. It had proven that it was willing to attack a human, and that was all the crew would need to consider it too dangerous to set free. Even if she didn't entirely agree with it, she had to maintain a semblance of reason, and after that, there was no reasonable conclusion she could come to that didn't end with the mermaid being imprisoned. At that point, it wasn't worth getting her crew angry at her.
Two more deckhands stepped forward and between the five of them, they picked the creature up and carried it to a lower deck. Fareeha was silent as she watched the mermaid vanish from her sight, and instead looked to the injured deckhand.
"Damn thing," he grumbled.
"Go see the medic," Fareeha told him. "At the very least, make sure it gets cleaned and dressed." With that, she stepped away from him. He'd be fine; the mermaid hadn't done any serious lasting damage. It was just a blood-drawing bite and she was certain that she'd never heard of a story of merfolk being venomous before.
Despite her hesitation in keeping their new cargo, Fareeha did find herself somewhat curious about the cryptid. She had truly never even seen a merperson before. They were exotic, elusive, exceptionally rare creatures, and their value was something that could hardly be fathomed. They lived exclusively in the mansions and palaces of the wealthiest people in the world, serving as centerpieces of their fortunes and empires. While Fareeha and her crew were certainly not struggling for money, they were a far cry from the people who usually got to lay their eyes on such a luxury. A live wild mermaid hadn't even been seen in well over a decade, much less captured alive. They were reclusive and incredibly aggressive when cornered. And yet there was one of these absurdly rare creatures just a couple decks below her feet. At the very least, she could observe the beast before it was inevitably sold to the tune of millions.
Ignoring the warning bells going off in the back of her head, she moved down the stairs to their lowest deck, where they had a small storage tank. It was there more so as a place to store emergency food in the case they ran through their supplies and needed to resort to catching fish. She could only recall having used it two or three times in her career, but now it was serving a much different purpose. As she pushed the door to the small room open, she stopped.
A couple of crew members who hadn't been on the deck when the mermaid had been pulled out of the water were gathered in the room, but when they saw their captain the immediately straightened up and left the room before she could say anything to them. Fareeha resisted the urge to sigh; the damn mermaid was already making it hard for people to listen to her orders. Maybe that's where they got their reputation as enchantresses from. Finally, she came to a stop directly in front of the wall of glass that took up most of the room. The mermaid was barely visible - it was curled up in a compact ball in the far corner of the square tank, shielding everything but the orange-gold of its tail from prying eyes. As Fareeha sat down on one of the storage crates in the room, watching the mermaid intensely as she rested her arms on her legs, she couldn't help be struck with a strong feeling of pity for the beast. It was just frightened. They had unceremoniously ripped it from its natural habitat, ganged up on it and restrained it, and they stuck it in a cage where it had nowhere to hide. The entire time the mermaid had been in her presence, it had been tense and on-edge; even now, the position it was laying in wasn't natural or relaxed - it was forcing itself into such a small shape as if to cease to exist, shielding itself from the reality of the situation it found itself.
The captain seemed to recall that soft voices and gentle tones could help to calm scared animals. Perhaps that would work with the mermaid.
"My name is Fareeha," she told the creature, her voice even. "Captain Fareeha Amari." For a moment, Fareeha doubted that the mermaid could hear her through the glass, but its tail shifted ever so slightly, allowing a blue eye to stare at her from behind the wall of gold. "Do you have a name?" Unsurprisingly, the mermaid just continued to watch her with the same blank glaze to its eye and she once again tried to ignore the nagging feeling of disappointment. This mermaid was no more sentient than a dog or a cat. It couldn't even understand the words she was speaking to it, much less communicate with her.
"I don't want to call you 'mermaid'. How about I give you a name? Would you like that?" The mermaid just blinked silently. For a long moment, she returned the creature's silence, pondering to herself over what kind of a name would suit a creature she knew nothing about. The only thing she had really seen the mermaid do was bite one of her sailors on the leg and immediately change its mind and show him a tiny bit of mercy by letting go. Fareeha smiled to herself before making eye contact with the mermaid once more. "How about Mercy? It means to show kindness or compassion when you don't have to. Sort of how you decided to not tear one of my deckhand's legs off. That was an act of mercy, right? I think it suits you." The irony of naming a dangerous mermaid Mercy wasn't lost on Fareeha, but she highly doubted that the creature cared in the slightest what she called it.
When she looked at the mermaid's blue eye once more, however, it had changed. Mercy's expression seemed to be a bit harsher and it only stared back at Fareeha's own brown eyes for another moment before the tail covered it's face once more.
After that final display, Fareeha knew that there was nothing she could say that would coax the mermaid out of its defensive ball, so rather than waste her time, she stood up. Mercy just needed time to get comfortable, needed to be left alone and given time adjust to its new surroundings. It certainly wasn't going to just sit in that ball for the entire trip, it was only a matter of time before the mermaid calmed down. Before exiting the room, Fareeha looked back at Mercy for a second. The mermaid's tail had moved so that two ocean blue eyes were watching her as she retreated, but they were filled with such a deep sadness that she hesitated in the doorway for several seconds. Finally, Fareeha shook her head and closed the door behind her, sure that she was just imagining it.