Chapter Text
The rocky shore at the base of the cliffs in Hanamura was beautiful in its way, but desolate. Unlike the busy streets a hundred feet above, with their gorgeous cherry blossoms and intriguing mix of ancient and new buildings, the shoreline was empty of humanity, essentially unreachable from the town above.
That made it a perfect landing zone for Overwatch's dropships, coming in under the cover of night and running on stealth mode to avoid detection. Dr. Angela Ziegler, codename Mercy, was on the first ship to touch ground. Her comm crackled with brief static, before the pilot of the third dropship spoke. "Had to detour around an unexpected private jet. We'll be coming in on a new trajectory, ETA delayed six minutes."
"Acknowledged," Jack Morrison's deep voice replied. "Everyone else, stay on your toes and ready to go."
There was a further chorus of acknowledgements, Angela's included. Despite the command, however, she saw people around her relaxing. These were seasoned soldiers, they wouldn't let their guard down, but it was difficult to hold a highly alert state when there was no immediate need to do so.
Taking advantage of the downtime, Angela moved farther along the beach, away from the two ships on the ground. The soft light from the wings of her Valkyrie suit was enough for her to see where she was going, and not risk turning her ankle in an unexpected stumble over the rocks. Breathing deeply, she savoured the salty sea breeze, perfumed with the faintest hint of cherry blossoms from the trees far above.
Soon enough the air would be saturated with the sharp scent of pulse emissions, caustic burn of gunpowder, and heavy iron tang of blood. The latter she was accustomed to through her career as a doctor and surgeon, but the first two were new and strange to her. This was only her third field mission. The quiet moment to clear her head before they began their assault on the Yakuza group who essentially owned Hanamura was welcome.
Angela still wasn't certain how she felt about being the chief medic to this very military organization. Warfare went against her very purpose as a doctor. Yet she did believe that sometimes you had to fight to protect the vulnerable. And Overwatch had vastly extended the reach of her ability to help people across the world, not to mention was funding her cutting edge research.
A sound reached her, barely audible over the waves breaking over the rocky beach. Frowning, Angela cocked her head, wondering if she'd imagined it. Then it came again, a soft gurgling that sounded to her experienced ears like someone struggling to draw breath.
Eyes wide, she hurried her steps along the shoreline, searching for the source. She didn't dare call out, not when she was in the midst of a stealth operation, but if there was someone hurt down here...
There. A dark lump against the paler rocks, rocking gently each time the waves swept in and out. It seemed too small to be human, but she could see an outflung hand. A child? The hand was adult-sized.
Heart in her throat, Angela crossed the last few feet and crouched beside the injured man. As the faint light from her wings fell over him, it became immediately obvious why his shape was disproportioned - he was missing both legs at the thighs, and his right arm at the shoulder.
Most of what was left of him was covered in horrific burns, with deep cuts sluggishly oozing blood in a way that suggested there wasn't nearly enough left in his body. Ironically, the burns had probably saved his life, cauterizing the severed limbs so he hadn’t bled out instantly.
Gasping, Angela fumbled the Caduceus Staff off her back and aimed it at the unknown man, flicking the healing beam on. It was likely far too late to save him, but she had to try. "Ana!" she called over the comms. "I need you west on the beach, bring the healing kit!"
The sniper was qualified as a field medic, and had given Angela a hand after battles before, or in dire circumstances. "What's going on?" Ana demanded. A moment later Angela heard running footsteps crunching over the pebbled beach in her direction.
"I'm not sure," Angela replied, her voice tight. "There's a man washed up on the beach missing most of his limbs, he's horribly injured, but alive."
Ana dropped to her knees beside them, and muttered a word that Angela strongly suspected was a curse. "How is he still alive? Mercy, we cannot possibly save him." Despite her protest, she ripped open the kit and pulled out the rubber straps meant to serve as tourniquets, and applied the first to his right shoulder.
When she tightened the strap, he gurgled again in protest at the pain. His remaining hand twitched, flailing weakly, and Angela realized in shock that he was trying to bat Ana away from him. "Mein gott... he's awake?"
Hastily she engaged the translator embedded in the Valkyrie suit's 'halo', not knowing if he might speak any language but Japanese. "Hold still," she commanded in her firmest tones, pushing gently against his hand to stop him from trying to move it again. "I'm a doctor, I'm trying to help you. There is no danger."
The noise he made was a terrible wet choking sound. After a horrified moment she realized he was trying to speak. Abandoning any attempt at stealth, she brushed her fingers over the switch that would turn the Valkyrie suit's power up to full, lighting up their section of the beach, so she could get a better look.
Impossibly, the man was even worse injured than she'd first realized. Blood leaked from beneath his eyelids, which were so deeply sunken she feared there might be nothing beneath them. His lower face was badly damaged, and his throat was ravaged to the point that she had no idea how he was getting any air at all.
This time Angela's curse mingled with Ana's, as they both scrambled to shift their focus. Angela tossed the Caduceus Staff to Ana, who continued to aim it at the man. Grabbing the field kit, Angela withdrew a sterile scalpel and tracheotomy tube.
She hadn’t checked for potential spinal injuries yet, but if the man couldn’t breathe at all, he wasn’t going to last long enough to care about paralysis. Carefully tilting his head back, Angela used the scalpel to make an incision in the cricothyroid membrane of his throat, then eased the rigid tube through it into his windpipe.
Air whistled through it, and his chest began to rise and fall more steadily. A harsh rasp remained that suggested the lungs themselves were also damaged, but Angela could do nothing about that other than keep the Staff on him. Thankfully he seemed to pass out again, going limp.
"What the hell are you two doing?" Morrison demanded, surly over the comm. "This isn't a humanitarian relief operation, it's a strike and we need to get moving."
"I am not walking away and leaving a dying man to suffer," Angela replied sharply. "If you wish to go ahead without your primary healer, be my guest. I'll catch up when and if my patient is either stabilized or dead." Humanitarian operation or not, she was a doctor first. She'd made that clear to Morrison when she joined Overwatch, and no amount of growling would force her to go back on her oaths now.
"You might as well save your breath, Jack. This won’t take long," Ana said with dark humour. "Every beat of the man's heart is a miracle."
"You're giving our position away." Morrison's grumble came in stereo, over her comm and from a few feet to the left as he prowled down the beach to meet them. When he got a look at the injured man, he grunted in shock, and a sort of grudging admiration entered his voice. "You're right, he should be dead. Damn. Mercy..."
"No." She glared, daring him to try ordering her away. "I understand this isn't the purpose of our mission here. I know this strike is important. But I will not ignore the suffering of a man literally at my feet."
He gave her a very wry smile. "I was going to ask if you have any idea what could cause wounds like that. If somebody up there has this kind of firepower, we need to rethink how this strike is going to work."
Grateful she wasn't going to have to keep arguing with him, Angela examined the injuries again. They seemed more horrific every time she looked, spotting new cuts and burns and broken bones. There was clearly grievous injury done to his internal organs, possibly to his spine as well. She needed the equipment she had back at the Watchpoint to be able to catalogue it all, but she had to admit he was unlikely to make it that far.
Unless and until he actually died, she would keep trying to save him even if she knew it was surely hopeless.
"The cuts look like they were done by a very sharp, single-edged blade," she listed, trying to sound as detached as possible. "Given our current location, I'd hazard a guess that a katana of some kind was involved. But these burns... I've never seen anything quite like them. An energy weapon, no doubt about that, but I have no idea what."
Morrison looked at Ana, who was applying compression bandages to the damaged limbs now that the tourniquets were in place. She answered without looking up from her work. "No idea either. You may have a point about it not being wise to charge into a battle that could involved a weapon this powerful. There's no chance he didn't come from here, he can't have survived more than a few minutes, so he must have fallen from above and washed up immediately."
Angela looked up. The castle that crowned Hanamura was directly above, balconies jutting out over the cliffside. Lights flickered, and she could dimly make out the forms of people swarming one of those balconies. Nobody was peering down at the beach, not yet, but clearly something had happened up there.
"We're pulling out," Morrison made the call. "Dropships bravo and charlie, back in the air. Head for the nearest Watchpoint. Alpha will follow you shortly." He cocked his head at Mercy. "Can you get him stable enough for transport? We can't stay here."
"Moving him could kill him, but not moving him will kill him just as fast." Angela sighed in acknowledgement of her own helplessness. Even with the best technology she'd been able to develop, she could never hope to defeat death entirely. "It's in God's hands now. I need a stretcher, he must be kept as still as possible."
"I'll get it." Turning, Morrison jogged back down the beach at his inhumanly fast pace. Angela was gratified that he'd not only conceded her right to treat the injured man, but was doing what he could to help.
It reaffirmed her decision to join Overwatch in the first place. Yes, they were a military force, and yes, she disagreed with some of their policies. But at their heart, they were an organization meant to protect the world. So long as Jack Morrison didn't forget that, Angela would continue to serve. And she'd do what she could to remind him when he needed it.
Somehow they got the unknown man transferred to the stretcher without killing him in the process. Morrison carried one end while Ana held the other, Angela walking alongside with her Staff still aimed at the man’s throat. There was a spot in the dropship meant for the stretcher to lock in, securing it for transport. The moment they were all onboard, Morrison gave the command to lift, and Angela braced a hand on the wall to keep her feet as the ship swayed.
The Caduceus Staff technology was making a difference. The ends of his ravaged limbs were still so much raw meat when she peeled the bandage back to check, but the bleeding had stopped, and Angela worked quickly to set up an IV to transfuse more blood and fluids into him. "Athena, can we get a facial ID, or is he too damaged?"
"Scanning." There was a long pause as the AI processed the man's image through worldwide databanks. "Positive identification: Genji Shimada. "
Morrison made a disbelieving noise. "As in, the youngest son of the Shimada clan? The Yakuza family we were targetting tonight?"
"Correct, Commander."
"Definitely made the right call to pull out." Morrison stood over the stretcher, arms crossed as he stared down at the patient. "Must be some kind of internal strife happening, or inter-gang fighting. We could have walked right into the middle of a bloodbath. Mercy, if he does survive, I want to be notified the instant he wakes. Athena, have MPs standing by at the Watchpoint to guard his room."
"Acknowledged."
"So he's a prisoner, now?" Angela frowned at Morrison. "I don't think he's likely to be going anywhere, Jack."
He huffed, a sound of mingled laughter and acknowledgement. "No, I don't think he is. But his people may attempt a rescue - or whoever did this to him may try to finish the job, if they ever realized he lived."
Disturbed by the notion, Angela looked down at her patient. He seemed to still be unconscious, but he was restless in it, muscles twitching sporadically. Perhaps he dreamed he was still fighting, or perhaps it was merely nerves stressed far beyond tolerance firing at random. Reaching out, she threaded her fingers through what remained of his incongruously green hair.
Her touch did seem to calm him somewhat. The odds of his survival were horrifically low, even with the cutting edge medical technology she'd created through Overwatch. If he did make it, he would be crippled for life, far too damaged for cybernetic implants to be a realistic option. They could most likely replace his eyes, if the optic nerves weren't too scarred, but his limbs would require at least three times more cybernetic nerve connections than the generally accepted maximum human tolerance limit.
Stroking her hand through his hair again, Angela hoped that Genji Shimada had an uncommon amount of stubbornness and the will to live. He was going to need every bit of it, and then some.