Long-ass introductory note incoming:
1. I'm...not entirely sure what this is. It originally started as what I wanted to be a huge oneshot, but as is the case with me, it grew completely out of hand. It won't be super long, I'm thinking probably 6-7 chapters but god knows I'm fucktastic at outlining anything so we'll see where this ends length-wise.
2. Ships won't be coming into it until towards the end; this is more so an exploration of Angela's life. It follows her life and all the major lore-related points in Overwatch's history that involved Angela. So, the creation of the staff and the Valkryie suit, Angela's life before Overwatch (including her parents' deaths and her living with Torb for a while), her life after the fall, Uprising, Genji's surgery, dabbles into her relationship with Moira, and I'm sure a lot more shit I have outlined that I'm forgetting about right now.
3. Fareeha is a kid in the beginning, but there's absolutely nothing romantic between them until we get to post-fall. Don't worry about that. It's a Pharmercy fic, but not for a while into it.
4. I'm aware Mercy's timeline is a little messed up; I initially thought that she joined Overwatch at 18 years of age and spent two full hours mapping out the broken mess that is Overwatch's timeline, and planning the entire fic around it. So when it was brought to my attention that Mercy didn't join Overwatch until she was in her early 20s, I decided I quite frankly do not give a fuck because there's no force in hell on earth that will get me to try to make sense of this series' timeline again. It's pretty much all Tracer's fault, but I'm not gonna get into it. So you get a slightly young Dr. Ziegler. Go crazy.
5. Just a warning, while there's no character death involving canon characters, the 'deaths' of characters as Angela knows them (Ana, Jack, and Gabriel) is referenced.
6. I...hate the fact that half the fucking cast of Overwatch don't have callsigns so I'm rectifying that for the sake of consistency.
Jack, Gabe, Ana, and Reinhardt are just referred to by their titles. So, Strike Commander, Captain Reyes, Captain Amari, and Lieutenant respectively.
McCree = Ranger (100% not inspired by Walker Texas Ranger I have no idea where you'd ever get that idea)
Torbjörn = Engineer (maybe you should go back to playing tf2)
Genji = Sparrow (don't give me that look)
Moira = Wraith (lololol I don't think Moira is even gonna be on any missions in this fic but I'm sticking this here for reference)
Winston is exempt because he's a talking gorilla, he doesn't have an identity to hide. Mei is exempt because she's probably not gonna be referenced much. She's a bit distanced from the other original members, anyway.
The first time Angela Ziegler set foot on a battlefield, she was three. She didn't remember it, but didn't have to.
War was something that every child her age grew up with. The Crisis Generation, the older folks called them. An entire generation of children, raised in a warzone. They never saw what the peaceful era was like, from those long-bygone days from before the Omnics declared their hatred of people, and responded with a global bloodbath. Cites reduced to rubble, entire families slaughtered, rural communities completely purged from existence, leaving only husks of homes and shrapnel behind to leave a hint as to what ended the peace they once knew.
No nation was safe from the touch of the Omnics, and every human in the world was left wondering when they'd be next, or which type of machine would eventually destroy them. The Bastions, with their machine guns and tank shells, the Eradicators, with their impregnable shields, the O-Rs, with their barriers and iron-clad defenses. Any one of them could tear a home to pieces in a matter of minutes. For most children her age, it was not merely a fear, but a reality, not a question of "if", but rather "when". Humanity had been trying for nearly a decade to gain a hold in this 'war', as some laughably called it, but it was more accurately dubbed by some as a lost cause. With the Omnics becoming stronger by the day, it looked like the end of humanity was an inevitable reality.
Those were the stories Angela grew up with, and for the first few years of her life, before she even knew what an Omnic was, there was peace in her home. When she was three, the first Omnics came near her home in the Swiss Alps. The modest town she grew up in was evacuated for a few weeks, while local law enforcement came up with a peaceful solution to keep robots out of the area. She returned home with her parents, and they lived their lives with content, untouched by the horrors of far-off nations who preferred a more violent approach to their conflicts than Switzerland did. Killings were not unheard of in her home country, but they were certainly more rare, as the government desperately did anything they could to appease the machines, terrified of the carnage they could inflict.
When Angela was five, she became interested in the way things were made. It was not merely enough for her to just accept something in a state of being, she wanted to see how it worked, how it came to be. She wanted to know what laid behind the outer shell of everything she touched. She started by tearing her toys apart. At first, her parents brushed it off as a destructive phase, but one night, as her father sat on the couch behind her, he was able to see past the dismembered plastic doll in her hands and saw the way her brows furrowed, the way her eyes absolutely shone with a curiosity that was far stronger than anything a child her age should have been making. And so, the Ziegler's began to indulge in their daughter's special interest, showering her with praise and buying her toys especially to break and broken computers to toy with.
By the time she was six people started to call her other things.
"A genius," a distant uncle once said to her father, nodding approvingly as she rolled a computer chip around in her fingers.
"A prodigy," one of her mother's friends called her, watching her play around with the innards of a stuffed animal as she drank tea at their kitchen table.
"Gifted," a teacher told both her parents, shortly after her initial enrollment in primary school.
Her parents would always roll their eyes at such words, and tell her that she was Angela to them. Nothing more, and that was all she ever needed to be. She definitely preferred being called Angela than any of those other names.
One night, Angela awoke to a deafening roar around her. Before she had time to process it, before her heart could even fully leap out of her chest, the ceiling of her bedroom came crashing down around her. The eight-year-old barely had time to roll over onto her stomach and instinctively cover the back of her head with her arms before she was pinned down to her bed by layers of rubble. The fact that it didn't immediately kill her was a miracle, but that did very little to settle the panic that quickly rose to her chest as she felt a warm fluid trickle down her face on both sides.
With her heart pounding in her chest and her body aching, Angela called out for her parents, but no reply came. Only the muffled sounds of machines and gunfire and explosions and screaming and sirens played in the distance, reminding Angela of all the stories she had heard. Terror the likes of which she had never experienced before tore at her very soul, as she laid herself flat against her bed and tried to drown the songs of war out with the sounds of her own sobs and calls for help.
She wasn't sure how long she laid there like that. Time seemed to inch by slowly, but it could have been less than an hour for all she knew. Still, gradually, the sounds faded away, bringing only silence from the outside. It was shortly after that, that someone lifted some of the weight off her small form, letting out a surprised sound when she looked up at him.
It was not a man that Angela recognized. He was wearing a uniform that she did, however. He was a solider. With gentle arms, he shifted the last of the ceiling off of her and lifted her out of the remains of her home. That was when Angela finally got a looked at the carnage that she had only been able to listen to earlier.
Her hometown was on fire; the sky was filled with clouds of smoke, every house on her street was leveled, filled with gunshots and tank shells. Destroyed machines laid strewn throughout the frames of what was once homes. Out of the corner of her eye, Angela saw a flash of a silvery platinum blonde on the ground, identical to her own hair color, and she began to turn her head. However, the solider firmly pressed her face against his shoulder, not allowing her to get a clear look in any directed but behind him.
"Let's get you looked at, yeah?" he said instead, taking care to not allow her to look back at her house as he carried her in the opposite direction. His grip tightened on her ever so slightly as her tears started to stain the front of his shirt.
She was brought to a huge, long building - it looked sort of like a school from the outside, with a somewhat large yard surrounding the entire building, the back of it fenced off, and ring of trees and flowers surrounding the entire structure. A house filled with nearly one-hundred other young girls who had their lives torn apart by the gunfire of an Omnic. An orphanage. Before the Crisis, orphanages had been all but phased out in exchange for a more structured fostering system, but that was a thing of the past. The resulting death tolls meant that thousands upon thousands of families were torn apart, millions of children left with nobody, or with traumatized, shell-shocked parents that could no longer care for them, or with family units that could simply no longer afford the cost of a child. Such was the toll of war.
Buildings with the purpose of housing children until they could find guardians started springing up in even the most developed of nations, and Switzerland was no exception. They gave it a different name. The adults who took care of them never used the word 'orphanage', they called it a Girl's Home, but it was anything but a home to Angela. And while the stand-in caretakers did a good job, never mistreated her or any other girls who were forced to call the institution a home, it was a far cry from the love, support and pride her parents had showered her in.
Among the caretakers, the one who worked with Angela the most was an older woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Kaiser. Mrs. Kaiser was in charge of the admission and discharge of every girl who passed through those doors, and it was her that tried to find good matches between her charges and the adults who wanted to give them homes. The day she first arrived, she gave Angela a tour of the huge house, showed her where she would eat and sleep and play. Most of that day passed by in a haze, as images much more horrific than a cafeteria were burned into her brain. The only part Angela truly remembered was finally sitting down on the end of the bed, burying her head in her hands and crying. She trembled and sobbed as the shock of the day's events caught up to her, hardly able to breathe, with no concept of who was around her.
Angela's body gave a small jolt when the bed shifted beside her and a pair of arms wrapped around her tiny frame, pulling her into a tight hug. Mrs. Kaiser stroked her head gently, just holding her until the sobs began to quiet. Angela had no idea how long they sat there like that, but the woman waited it out, just held her like that until she was ready to stop the tears.
"You'll be alright, Angela." Her voice was soft, kind. Angela would have almost called it motherly, had she not been unwilling to ever use such a term to describe anyone but her own mother. "Everything will be okay."
Angela Ziegler spent her ninth birthday in an orphanage. There was no celebration for her, no brightly wrapped boxes and bags, no singing, none of her favorite food. It came by and passed like any other day, for she was nothing special in the huge house that no part of her considered a home. She was just a face in a crowd of a hundred other girls just like her. They had all been displaced by war; there was nothing unique about her situation, nothing that made her more or less tragic than the brunette that slept above her, the blonde to her left, or the redhead to her right. They were all just remnants of desecrated families. The last to hold their family's names, but completely alone.
After the first night, Angela tried not to cry in front of other people. The atmosphere in the orphanage was bleak enough. Nobody there was happy, and it seemed every day someone was leaving, and somebody else would arrive, wounds of their new loss bleeding heavily as sniffles and muffled sobs could be heard in the shared bedroom every single night. On the eve of her ninth birthday, she cried into her pillow, but did so silently, as to not disturb the people around her.
She spent her tenth birthday in an orphanage, too, but by that time, she had no tears left to shed. Instead of being gripped by sorrow and drowning in old memories, Angela threw herself into her studies. By the time she was ten years old, her interest in the inner workings of devices and toys had grown into a nearly insatiable appetite to learn. She quickly surpassed all the girls her own age in the lessons that were taught at the orphanage, her level of comprehension rivaling even girls two or three years older than she was. Very few people noticed that, however. Either that, or they simply did not acknowledge it, never encouraged her like her parents used to. It didn't bother Angela, however. She just continued to learn more from books and time spent on one of the old computers in the playroom.
After their daily lessons, people would arrive throughout the day, usually adults. Occasionally, a girl would be taken out of the various rooms they had for entertainment, given a chance to talk to the adults, and if things went well, they'd go home with them. They were the lucky ones.
Angela only did that once, and it went terribly, as she was barely able to strike up any kind of conversation with them and spent most of the meeting staring at her feet. She was different than the other girls, she had quickly noticed. While the other children ran around in their groups of friends, playing and screaming and laughing, she would quiety read. She'd always watch the other girls, but politely declined when she was offered a place in their games. She preferred to watch. They still didn't call her Angela at the orphanage, either. Instead of "genius" and "prodigy". She was called "weird" and "freak". When they thought she wasn't listening, she'd hear the caretakers call her "shy" and "too quiet". They worried for her because of that.
Adoption was a word that she heard thrown around a lot. To many, it was a competition, or at least that's how it seemed to Angela. There was a strong attitude of wanting, needing to stand out, that you had to appeal to the adults who came by. It had been almost two years since she came to the orphanage, and sometimes the caretakers would pull her aside. Two years was evidently too long for a kid to only have had one adoption interview the entire time they'd been there. They would always tell her that they weren't scolding her, but they would speak to her in a tone of voice that told her otherwise. They would tell her that they only wanted what was best for her, that they wanted her to find a home where she would be happy, and it was difficult if all she did was sit aside and read all day long.
Angela secretly hated the idea of being adopted. She was the last of her family, the last person to carry the name Ziegler, and her name was the only fragment of her old life she had left to hold on to. Having a real home might have sounded nice, but she didn't want that to be at the cost of her identity. And a house would never be a home without her parents. The only person she ever told that to was Mrs. Kaiser, who just gave her a smile and told her that her parents would be happier to know she had found a place where she belonged.
Angela didn't agree that she would ever 'belong' with a group of strangers, but kept her comments to herself.
And so, life went on.
Her eleventh birthday passed. As her relatively peaceful life continued, the carnage of the Omnics continued as well. However, for the first time in her life, there were whispers in the air, some tiny shred of hope that people seemed to be slowly buying into. There were rumors of a new foundation forming, an international group of soldiers and scientists who were speaking of coming together to give humanity a fighting chance against the Omnics. She wrote if off as a false hope, as she herself had seen what those machines could do. There was no fighting back against that. All that could be done was to mend the damage. Not prevent it, but to heal it.
One day, while she was sitting on a loveseat in a back corner of a room filled with noise, the couch shifted behind her. She looked up from her book briefly, expecting to see one of the staff who worked in the orphanage, but instead was looking at a man she had never seen before in her life.
"You must be Angela," he grunted. His voice was rough, course, but not unkind. His appearance was very much the same way; the man was short, but his arms absolutely bulged with muscle, and his face was buried in a mane of blonde hair that covered both his head and his face. One of his eyes were covered with an eyepatch. Giving her a smile, he reached one of his hands out to her. Angela took it silently, before nodding her head once.
"My name is Torbjörn. Would you like to take a walk with me, Angela?"
For a moment, Angela noticed Mrs. Kaiser standing only a short distance away. When she saw Angela hesitate to answer him, the old woman gave her a very stern look that told her she'd be heavily scolded later if she refused his offer. Angela nodded once more, and stood up.
"I was told you've been here a while."
Her eyes shifted to the ground beneath her as the two of them walked across the grassy backyard of the orphanage. It almost seemed like he wanted a minute away from the loud noise just to talk to her, but if her track record when it came to things like this were anything to go by, this wasn't going to get them anywhere. Angela just shrugged. She was dimly aware of the fact that she currently held some kind of morbid record for the longest time spent with absolutely no interest whatsoever in potential adopters, but that knowledge tend to hurt more than she cared to admit, so she mostly ignored it. She had found that ignoring pain altogether made it easier to deal with.
"Ya know why that is?" he asked.
"Because there's nothing special about me," she replied robotically, internally flinching as the words came out. She hadn't meant for it to be verbal and it almost pained her to look back up at the man, for fear he would react poorly to her answer. Still, the words rang true, came directly from her heart, and as she continued to stare at her feet, she could feel tears stinging the back of her eyes for the first time in months. If there was one thing she had learned in her three years spent at this orphanage, it was that she was just a face in a crowd. A statistic. Nothing more.
Torbjörn frowned at her. "I can promise ya, that's not why." He placed a calloused hand on her chin, gently tilting her eyes upward to meet his. He smiled down at her. "The problem is that yer too special." As Angela blinked at him in confusion, the short man steered her toward a bench resting on the outside of a small playground, inviting her to sit down next to him. With a sigh, he turned to face her once more.
"I've met a lot of kids just like you, Angela. Yer fed lies all yer life, until you actually start believing them yerself. Ya don't fit a mold, so ya get labeled as an oddity. I could tell the second I laid eyes on you that yer not timid or shy, ya just don't act like kids yer age are expected to act. That's what we call potential."
"I always thought it just made me different," she murmured quietly, refusing to buy into such an idea.
"Nothing wrong with that!" Torbjörn replied. "Ya just need to find people who understands you. Gotta be able to see Angela, and not who they think Angela should be." He paused for a second to clap a hand to her shoulder. "Yer damn smart."
Angela shook her head. "I just like to learn. That doesn't make me-"
"That's not what the staff here says," he cut her off gently. "When I arrived here, the first thing I asked old Kaiser was who her problem child was." His smiled returned. "And I don't mean the one that misbehaves the most, but the one that needed a home more than any other one."
"And she pointed you to me?" Angela asked, almost refusing to believe that.
"Yer name came up, among others. She told me yer a damn genius, Angela. That all ya do is read, all ya want to do is learn. That yer not satisfied with what other people teach, that you take it upon yerself to go above and beyond. That might be the reason yer still here after three years, but I get ya." Angela watched him as he stood up. She could feel a small spark lighting up at her chest at the direction the conversation seemed to be going, but quickly tried to bite it back. Hope was not something she could afford to have.
"I've taken in many children before, Angela. I look for the ones with potential, the ones life have been unkind to. Children like you." He clapped his other hand to her shoulder, kneeling down directly in front of her, gruff face contorted into a gentle, inviting expression. "There's nothing in you but potential. Ya got that fire to yer eyes that makes a world-changer. Believe me, ya don't belong in a place like this."
Torbjörn stood up once more. "If ya like the idea of havin' yer own bedroom in more permanent arrangements, I'd be more than willing to open my home to you. Maybe we could even do something about that big brain of yers. Give it a bit of exercise."
Angela felt her breath inhale sharply at those words, her eyes wide in spite of her previous promise to herself that she wouldn't feel hope.
Torbjörn smiled at her. "If ya need time to think about it, I'd be more than happy to stop by later in the week."
Before she even knew what she was doing, Angela shook her head, standing up in half a second, as the tears that had almost started earlier began to slide down the side of her face. "I don't need to think about it!" she rushed out, completely overwhelmed by the turn their conversation had taken. A small voice in the back of her head was telling her to be careful, that she knew nothing about this man or where he came from or how sincere he was truly being, but Angela quickly shut it out. After three years, there was no way she would let an opportunity like this pass her by.
That, and nobody had spoken to her like that since her own parents had.
"I want to go with you," she let out in a choked whisper as tears flowed freely down her face.
Torbjörn smiled at her. "Then there's work to be done."
While Torbjörn met with some of the staff of orphanage, Angela went back to the bedroom, where she quickly began throwing her meager belongings into suitcase that had been under her bed since the day she had first arrived at the orphanage.
"I'm assuming it went well?" a familiar voice asked her, as Angela noticed Mrs. Kaiser standing in the doorway. The excitement on her face must have been answer enough, for the old woman approached her, wrapping her up in a tight hug
"I'm so proud of you," she murmured.
It was bittersweet, in a way. Angela had never had a friend in orphanage, she had never belonged to any groups, didn't even have a relationship with any of the caretakers. She had always kept to herself, been quiet to a fault, and never once felt at home there, but she could still feel a part of her heart aching at the woman's touch. It was nothing like the heartbreak that had haunted the last several years of her childhood, but it hurt in its own way, knowing this was probably the last time she would ever see this woman, who had acted as the closest thing she had to family for years. She truly was going to miss her. Mrs. Kaiser was the only person who ever acted like she cared her even remotely since her parents had been taken from her.
It was only when Mrs. Kaiser pulled back from her, absolutely beaming, that Angela realized those words had been uttered out loud. "You're such a sweet little girl." She tucked a lock of her platinum blonde behind her ear. "Don't miss me, Angela. I want you to walk out that door, and never look back."