When the word spread that Fareeha was making and bringing desserts to the infirmary, it wasn't long before Angela's office was littered with people lounging about all over the floor.
Angela didn't really mind the tea party that happened every day after she had napped, as she would have spent that time chatting away with Fareeha anyway. Now that nobody specific demanded her attention, she could finally get back to her work, and she was very good at tuning out the new distraction. But one day, she stopped typing furiously at her computer as she was writing her next paper, when she kept hearing her name.
"My money's on Angela", whispered Lena.
"Me too", came a chorus of voices.
"I also think that the doctor will win", drawled Jesse.
"What's going on?" interrupted Angela.
"We're putting down bets between you and Fareeha", said Hana. "Reinhardt said that Fareeha is much smarter than she looks, so we're challenging you two to a game of chess."
"What!" asked Fareeha, who had been so grossly absorbed in her book that she had only just noticed that everyone was talking about her.
"I haven't played in so long", said Angela. "I enjoyed it as a child, but I didn't have time for it when I got older."
"I don't know how to play it at all", said Fareeha.
"Good then!" exclaimed Reinhardt. "You're both on similar grounds! Come on Fareeha, you have to prove yourself!"
"I don't mind giving it a try", shrugged Fareeha.
Angela figured that there was no use resisting, so she agreed as well.
Winston brought a small, worn chess set from the lab, and laid it on Angela's desk. He set up the pieces and explained the rules to Fareeha, who never acknowledged anything Winston said. She just stared at the board.
Lena flipped a coin, and let Angela call it. It landed on heads, giving Angela the white side.
Angela had never learned much strategy, but she remembered liking opening by advancing her pieces towards the middle of the board. Fareeha followed suite. Angela only remembered to hide her king behind her pawns because Winston had just mentioned it in his explanation to Fareeha. In that move, Fareeha took Angela's knight for free without Angela realizing it had been in danger. She determined that she had been playing half-heartedly, and decided to slow down and start thinking about her next moves.
The game slowed down to a snail's pace at that point. After two hours, Lena's leg was shaking impatiently up and down. Lúcio yawned and stretched. MeiLing had fallen asleep with her head in Aleksandra's lap. Angela was starting to get a hang of the game, and was planning her steps very far in advance, anticipating moves that Fareeha might make. She thought she was in control, until she found Fareeha's bishop checking her king. She would have to move her king out of the way, but when she did, Fareeha would be able to take Angela's queen.
Angela looked up at Fareeha in surprise. The woman was staring intensely at the board. Angela didn't think she had seen Fareeha look away even once during their whole match.
Angela wasn't one to cave into pressure, but in the several minutes that she stared at the board, calculating each possible outcome, she realized that if Fareeha played it right, there was no way Angela could win. Angela knew it was normal to forfeit in chess, but Angela didn't want to end the game that way. Plus, there was no guarantee that Fareeha could see what she saw.
At the point where Angela knew Fareeha should take her rook, Angela was surprised when Fareeha moved up a pawn. She breathed a sigh of relief. It was Fareeha's first time playing, after all. She was going to make mistakes.
"Fareeha, that's rude", Winston said before he could stop himself.
Angela looked up, and gaped when she saw that Fareeha had lost the intense look on her face. Her eyes were still glued downwards, but the corners of her mouth were pulled slightly upwards.
She's toying with me, thought Angela. Or maybe she wasn't and Fareeha really had made a mistake. There was only one way to know for sure, and that was to play it out.
No matter what Angela did, there was no way to stop Fareeha from moving the one pawn up, one space at a time, until it reached Angela's side of the board. Angela watched in dismay as the pawn replaced the queen Fareeha had sacrificed earlier, and it was only then that Angela threw up her hands in defeat.
"Is it over?" said Jesse.
When Winston nodded, Reinhardt roared and threw his hands up in celebration, waking up everybody who had fallen asleep.
"My god, he won the whole pot", muttered Lúcio.
"Nope, he splits it with me", said Torbjörn.
"Dear lord, that's a lot of surströmming", said Lúcio.
"I never doubted you, Fareeha!" said Reinhardt in the only volume he knew how to use: loud.
"You said you've never played!" exclaimed Hana in an accusatory tone.
Fareeha stood up and rolled her shoulders. "I haven't, but when you're given that much time to think, it's not so bad. That was pretty fun."
"How could this happen?" yelled Lena. "Angela's a genius."
"I guess people can be smart in different ways", said Fareeha with a shrug. "I definitely can't do Angela's job. And just because I won this time doesn't mean I'll win next time."
"I want a rematch", said Angela, pressing her lips together in a tight line.
"Oh not again", said Hana. "I'm not staying around this time. I have better things to do."
"You both had a rocky start, but that was exceptional for your first time", said Winston. "I could probably enter you two in competitions after a bit of practice and study."
"I don't care about that", huffed Angela. "I only want to win against Fareeha. I won't stop until I beat her."
Fareeha smiled broadly, and folded her arms over her chest. "Then I have to make sure you never beat me."
Angela wanted to tear that smile off of Fareeha's face.
It happened very rarely, but the Overwatch team was conducting a mission in a city. To be specific, they were in Hong Kong, and Angela found herself with limited movement, as the numerous tall buildings prevented her from being able to fly between her dispersed teammates.
The team was hunting down a tank that a terrorist group was driving around the city. At first it was unclear what they wanted, but then they began blowing down entire apartment complexes that housed omnics.
It had taken the team two hours for Lena to fly their jet from their base in Gibraltar to Hong Kong, and the civilians still had no idea what to do. Their first instinct was to evacuate the streets, but the tank was only shooting at buildings, so they couldn't take refuge wherever there might be an omnic among them. So wherever the Overwatch team turned, people were packed together like sardines. It made the situation tricky because heavy duty weapons like Fareeha's rocket launcher would be necessary to disable the tank, but had a very high chance of injuring civilians.
Several members of the terrorist group were moving about the streets on foot, armed with rifles pressed against their hips. They shouted their message loudly into megaphones. They spoke in both Cantonese and English.
"Omnics are enemies, not friends. Report a neighbour, save your house."
Fareeha flew high for an aerial view of the situation.
"Pharah to units 1, 2, and 4. Barricade the streets at the following intersections." Fareeha started reading off coordinates, and Angela entered them into her GPS. "Unit 3, go to the following location and clear the area of civilians." Fareeha said some numbers, and Bastion whistled its acknowledgement. "That's where we will engage the tank."
"How do you know the tank will be there?" said Jesse.
"Trust me", said Fareeha over the radio. "We will engage the foot soldiers after we deal with the tank. If any try to stop you, only use lethal force if necessary."
Everyone gave the proper acknowledgments, and split up.
Angela was part of the units that were to set up barricades, but it was understood that she was free to provide medical treatment to anybody that needed it. And there was certainly no shortage of people who needed first-aid.
She moved through chaos, seeing things that she had seen too many times before. People digging their loved ones out of collapsed buildings. A woman crying as Angela made a splint for her leg that had been snapped in two. A man with tears running down his face as he yelled for his daughter that had been separated from him. The grim face of a boy as he stared at the corpses of his friends.
Among all the commotion, Angela could hear the angry buzz of the masses. They wanted to stop letting the omnics hide. If it would save human lives, they should give up the omnics.
Angela tried not to draw attention to herself, ducking out of the way whenever she saw anyone in a military uniform. She didn't want to encounter the enemy, but she didn't want the Hong Kong military to know she was there either. She wasn't supposed to let it become public knowledge that Overwatch was back, and she had been a prominent figure in the past. For this mission, she had disguised her iconic suit, and for the majority of the populace, it had been long enough that many had forgotten Angela's face. To each person she treated, she whispered to not lose hope, and to not give in and expose omnics. Most Hong Kong civilians understood English well enough, and the city had become multicultural to the point where nobody stared at Angela's blond hair. They didn't know who she was, but honoured the request of the woman who gave their friends and family life-saving treatment.
In the distance, Angela saw a ring of people gathered around something. She pushed her way through the crowd until she saw the body of a man who had been shot in the chest and abdomen. He was barely breathing, and she knelt down next to him, opened her satchel, and started an emergency operation.
Angela tilted her head slightly at people yelling at her in Cantonese, until someone addressed her in English.
"Stop it! That's a terrorist! He was rightly shot by our military forces."
"I'm still going to help him. This is a war of ideology, and nobody should have to die for it."
"If you help him, he'll kill more innocent people!"
"Does it look like he's capable of killing anybody right now?"
Somebody threw a rock at Angela, and it struck her temple, making her bleed. Angela continued her work, feeling the nanobots that rested under her skin repair damaged tissue. In the back of her head, she worried about her dwindling sources of personal nanobots. She knew that she should be saving them for field days, but she continued taking them every day anyway. She wanted to collect as much data as possible before she was forced to end her decades-long project.
In her peripheral vision, Angela saw people restraining the person who had thrown the rock at her. No doubt, many of them had seen her save the lives of their neighbours.
It was more concerning when she heard someone gasp upon noticing her closing injury and say something in Cantonese, with the only word she picked out being, "Mercy". The name spread like wildfire, and Angela hurried her work, suturing the man's flesh together and wrapping him up in a flurry of hands.
She cleaned up her tools, and threw her bloody gloves on the ground.
"When he wakes up, he should know that he almost died fighting for a group that had no qualms about taking innocent lives. And that he lived because despite all that, he's still human", said Angela.
"Hanzo to Mercy", came a strained voice through her earpiece.
"This is Mercy. Please continue."
"I have been immobilized. I require treatment." Hanzo stated his coordinates simply.
"Have you found cover?" pitched in a concerned sounding Jesse.
"Yes", responded Hanzo.
"You are extremely far from my current position", said Angela. "Pharah, if you could give me a hand?"
Within minutes, Angela spotted Fareeha hovering directly above her, and spreading her wings, she shot straight up towards her, amid a chorus of gasps.
Before Angela had someone in the sky to fly to, the use of her Valkyrie suit was mostly limited to horizontal movement. It wasn't usually a problem, given that it was much more common to fight in places with shorter or no buildings. But after the team's first mission, the potential of using Fareeha to bring Angela to where she needed to be did not pass anyone's attention. Many times, it was also a good way of keeping Angela out of harm's way. So Fareeha and Angela spent months practicing flying together, until the two had become an efficient aerial unit.
When Angela landed in a deserted alley, she saw Hanzo waving from behind a pile of rubble. He had been sprayed with bullets, but the attacker had somehow only managed to shoot his legs.
"Is it safe?" communicated Angela with hand gestures.
Hanzo pointed at the nearby corpse of a woman still clutching her gun, and Angela advanced to Hanzo's hiding spot.
"The injuries are not life-threatening", determined Angela. "We will use just enough nanobots to repair the bone." Angela administered a tiny dose of nanobots, and watched as some colour returned to Hanzo's complexion. Next was the hard part.
Angela instructed Fareeha to hold Hanzo down. She reached into her satchel and pulled out her tools, disinfecting them quickly by soaking them in ethanol and lighting them on fire. Before she bent down to take out each bullet and piece of debris with her forceps, she stuffed a ball of cloth into Hanzo's mouth. Angela always had the nimblest fingers. She stitched up Hanzo's wounds with ease as Hanzo screamed into his gag, straining against the hands Fareeha pressed on his shoulders, until he passed out from the pain.
"Reinhardt to Pharah, we have engaged the tank. It is exactly where you said it would be. We require your assistance."
"Can you take care of him?" Fareeha said to Angela.
"Yes", said Angela, wiping her bloody hands on Hanzo's shirt.
Without saying anything further, Angela hoisted Hanzo onto her shoulder, grunting in the effort.
"You're stronger than I thought", said Fareeha.
"Go", barked Angela.
